


For Whom Swallowed the Sun

by texastoasted



Category: Team Fortress 2
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Drama, F/F, Friendship, Gen, Team Bonding
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-03-01
Updated: 2019-03-20
Packaged: 2019-03-25 11:50:43
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 23
Words: 26,029
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13833672
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/texastoasted/pseuds/texastoasted
Summary: He is learning to let go, and she is learning to hold on. Neither of them feel like they're standing on steady ground, but hey- that's what friends bond over, right?





	1. Chapter 1

**Bee Cave, Texas**

**1965**

 

    That was the way of things, he supposed. 

    It was a saying that had gotten him through many a conflict that couldn’t be resolved by fighting-hell, he now viewed those as the easy kind. It was simple enough to take a gun and duke out whatever squabble was taking up valuable testosterone. It was the kind with words, with deep, ore-laced conflicts that ran through the ground and transcended generations and found their way into new blood. It was the kind with somebody just being so stubborn. It was the kind with somebody above you, better than you, who could treat you like shit on his boot and you just had to take it. His ma was the one that told him, originally, rocking in her big chair and rolling yarn into balls the cat would go to town on later. 

    “Sometimes, Dell, that’s just the way of things.” she would say in her seen-it-all voice, patient and everlasting as the bedrock under their feet. “Ain’t no use worrying yourself over things you can’t change.”

    How he wished for his ma’s wisdom, as everlasting as his immortal memory of her in his mind. Lord hope that one day he would attain it. He drew upon it when there wasn’t anything he could fix about something wrong, because that was what he did(fixing) and it was about the most frustrating thing when he couldn’t fix something. Eleven hard-science PhDs and the concept that was hardest for him to grasp was letting go.

    Letting go. That was what he was here to do, after all. 

 

    The same floorboards that had creaked underfoot when he’d sat here, years ago, on that cushioned stool next to his ma’s rocking chair. It had been long since he’d seen her, too long,  _ really  _ seen her. When her eyes were open and she could hold a conversation, even if it was a short and faint one. He came as soon as his father called. But by then they all knew it was too late.  _ Preparing to grieve _ , the doctor had called it, encouraging the family to start packing her things, settling her affairs. So when she died they would be ready. Her presence would be gone from the house and they wouldn’t come home to a cold bed and pristine sheets, the way Dell could tell his father made it. His ma always left the little frilly pillow in the front crooked, like someone had just gotten up. She had told him once it seemed more homely that way, and he wholeheartedly believed her. She was the embodiment of hospitality and making things look like they should, like her cornbread that looked straight off the cover of a southern living magazine.

    His father couldn’t bring himself to remove her rocking chair, then. It stood tilted in its same spot, frozen in time, an ageless thing preserved in amber light that filtered through the hand-hemmed curtains. There was no dust on it even though it hadn’t been used for a very long time. The cat avoided it, even, curling up next to the yarn basket instead, halfheartedly batting some threads. Bee Cave was hard for him to come back to. What he would give to have it echo memories of his mother, of fireflies and lemonade, of summers on the porch swing. It was just the way of things, he supposed, that his father had turned this place into a hollow shell of itself. Dell’s mother was the thing that brightened it and without her the life was sucked out of the land. Lord, wheat had never looked so not like sunshine. 

 

    There was a noise on the porch. Stamping boots, scraping against the bristly doormat that still said  _ home sweet home,  _ past all the crud that was caked on it. The clatter as the screen opened and shut.

    “Son,” said his father gruffly in greeting, hanging his bag on the row of hooks that waited for him. “You came.”

    “Of course I came, dad, I’ve been coming.”

    They stared at each other for a second, and the warm breeze carrying the smell of honeysuckle on it drifted through the screen and into the house.

    “You’re tracking mud.” Dell pointed. “Didn’t scrape hard enough, I guess.”

    “Never is hard enough for your ma.”

    “Was.” Dell corrected him. He watched his father’s eyes flick anywhere around the room but his own face. “We’re supposed to be grieving.”

    “She ain’t gone yet.” came a firm correction of its own. “Let’s set in the kitchen. I didn’t call you down here just because she’s in hospice.”

    The kitchen, the thing that most breathed life of his mother, was cold and smelled like cleaner. Artificial. Clinical. Too much like the hospital. The fridge hummed. It wasn’t the same one that had been here when he had last visited, a month or two ago, stopping by the house to pick up his mother some warm socks. Well, it  _ was _ the same fridge, but it had so many things stuck to it it was barely recognizable. Dell ached for the oven light to flick on like some sign she was still there with them. It remained dark, and his father obscured his view of it when he took a seat. Dell focused on the red plaid tea towel curtains above the sink instead, going stonelike in the chair as he remembered seeing his ma’s glowing cheeks through that window as he played outside, tinkering around with metal scraps. 

    “Dell. Your ma. She wrote to you, and told me I was to read you the contents if something happened to her. I intended on waiting until...but those were her words and wishes, then, you know some of her last conscious words to me were about you? Figures. Anyway, let’s see…”

    Dell was not sure if he was supposed to hear this, and pretended he didn’t, gazing at the ceiling fan that looked quite like a plucked and wilted daisy.

    “My son...stuff like that…” There was a pregnant pause. “Listen. I’ll give this to you to read yourself later. How about I just give you the gist so you can get going on with your life? It was her wish for you to inherit land. She knew you didn’t want nothing to do with this family. So it’s far, Dell, far away from here. House and barn already on it. Yours to do with what you wish. Happy eleventh PhD.”

    It was the way of things, he supposed, that he was just so damn tired of correcting his dad that he said nothing and let himself be badgered. The only person that would defend him-or rather, never even have to defend him because his dad would never start this crap when she was around-wasn’t here. Wouldn’t be here. “All right. I’ll thank her later today.”

    And he would, placing fresh flowers in the vase next to her new bed, the bed that many people had died in before her, the bed she would die in. She looked so fragile, cheekbones jutting out like icebergs, beautiful wheat-sunshine hair turned lackluster grey and thin against the pillow. There were many flowers and many cards. Dell held his own hands and kissed her on the forehead and thanked her. Her eyes did not open and they never would again.

 

    Dell did not stick around to wait for his father to begrudgingly offer him his childhood room to stay in for the night. He stood on the packed earth, next to the porch swing with its sunken pillows, and called his landlord to inform him he would need to find a new tenant. On the way out of Bee Cave, his truck kicking up so much dust it obscured the rear view that he did not want to look in, Dell thought for not the first time of the things he would say to his father if he had the energy. He’d said those things before, when he was younger and angrier. It was not the first time he’d wondered if his father remembered them. The feud that had lasted between them had aged over the years, badly, growing diseased and pockmarked. It was withering now, he sensed-while he was doing the very thing his father despised, moving away and not tending to the family land or following in his exact footsteps-he’d finally be far away, not making terse calls about when he was going to visit his mother. He’d be gone. Out of his father’s life, and their battle could die.

    The things he wished to tell his father, the relationship Dell yearned for them to have. It was just the way of things, he supposed, that it couldn’t be. It was just the way of things that his favorite person in the world had to go on and get sick and lay in a bed with the veins in her pale, thin wrist jabbed at all day. It was just the way of things that in the end, she still understood him, and let it go that while she actually agreed with his father she tried to understand and gave him what he wanted. She was a saint. She was who he wanted around, not the person occupying her space who didn’t know how to leave the pillows like someone had just gotten up. 

    It was just the way of things, he supposed.

 


	2. Chapter 2

**New York**

**1965**

 

    A tangerine, dented a little but fragrant and vividly sunset orange, was dropped on the concrete next to Constance with a  _ thud _ . Seth watched her eat it. She was so fucking weird, rubbing it good with the corner of her blouse, on the underside where no one could see if a bit of something came off. She would peel it with her long fingernails and place the things he would discard on her tongue like cookies in an oven, savoring them, closing her eyes.

    “Weirdo.” he scoffed for the millionth time that year, reaching down to take a sliver of the fruit for himself.

    Something muffled escaped past the peels.

     “So bitter, I don’t know how you stand it.”

    “Sounds a lot like you.” she responded, opening her eyes. Seth laughed, like a shot going off, and then it was quiet again. 

    “That’s funny, you know? Funny.” He settled down on the concrete steps next to Constance and gazed out into the yard. It was winter, marshmallow season as the two of them called it, watching all the little kids go by to the school down the block stuffed into so many layers it made them waddle. The yard of the high school was big, lots of room to roam around, but it was stuffed full of kids. They’d gotten yelled at the first few times they’d had lunch out back by the staff parking lot, next to the unloading bay for supply trucks and stuff. The segregated parking lot for the segregated staff. Not officially, of course, just all the teachers too good to share with the janitors. But they never made any trouble, and soon people stopped yelling at them. It was a great lunch spot, and the jutting overhand over the steps kept them out of the weather. There was a little yard, covered with snow now, and an adolescent tree. A little ways off, the parking lot. It was quiet outside, and Seth didn’t make a comment as Constance brought out her lunch. He’d stopped making comments when she got worked up enough to sock him for it. Deserved it, he did, and when she sobered up real quick for being yelled at by her parents on account of her damaging her nice little hands he understood it was his fault even more. It was when he started bringing her tangerines from the bush in his yard. They had an agreement, him and Constance, that if he died she would inherit the tangerine bush.

    “How’d your meeting with McBitch go?”

    It brought a wan smile to her cheeks. A weak one, but it was there. Seth smiled back even though she was looking at the tangerine, fingers cupped around it like it was a cup of coffee.

    “She gonna tell your parents?”

    “I suppose so. I’ll be in for it when I get home.”

    “Sucks.”

    “It is my fault.” 

    He didn’t have anything good to say for that. In a couple minutes, wedging a ham sandwich between his lips with the grip of a vice, he took out a beaten composition notebook and a pencil. Constance lowered her little metal spoon discreetly. He sketched for a while, the two of them sitting in silence.

    “What is that?”

    “It’s supposed to be the tree, asshole-”

    “No, I meant that. The writing.”

    Seth scrubbed his noise. It was beginning to drip from the cold seeping in through his threadbare jacket. “Oh. I dunno. Sometimes I just write stuff I feel and think of, you know? Either or.” He glanced down to the notebook. When she didn’t reply his eyes flicked back up to hers like changing traffic lights and saw a funny sort of expression he’d never seen before.

    “Don’t make fun of me! You’re the one that’s weird.” Seth grumbled.

    “I don’t think it’s weird. I’ve just never heard of it before. A whole notebook just for thoughts.”

    “Well, yeah. A journal, or something. Try it.”

    Constance walked home as she always did, pristine rubber boots tamping down fresh snow on the sidewalk. Her mother used to insist on sending someone to come get her, but it took so long with traffic and all she just preferred to walk. It was some of the only time she had to herself. At school, even with Seth-there was always someone. At home, even up in her room with the door that  _ must _ remain open-there was always someone, looming over her shoulder to make sure she was practicing piano and doing her spelling neat enough. It was the only time she could let her shoulders slouch. Careful, now, to make sure she didn’t scuff her boots. 

    Constance thought about the notebook.

    She thought of something of her very own, where she could write her deepest thoughts and no one would find it or read it. Where could she stash it where the maid wouldn’t find it and dutifully report it to her father? She envisioned her mother’s cold, pointed lilac manicure closing claw-like around her wrist. Around the notebook. Throwing it into the fire.

    Almost home, she stilled outside a bookstore, listened with one ear to the bustle instead. She thought about the notebook.

    Constance decided against it.


	3. Chapter 3

    It was an awful lot of land, Dell observed, stepping down from the cabin of his truck onto the loose dirt. It puffed up around his ankles in a miniature mushroom cloud, settling on the sensible steel-toed boots he’d chosen to carry him through college. His dad had been right-there was a house and barn already on the expanse of land, leaning into each other like two tired old dogs. 

    Dell looked around, hands on hips.

    There was the cattle fence as far as he could see, attached to an old ranch-style gate that he had had to get out of his truck to open. Dusty ground mingling with close-cropped straw and dead grass. Behind the structures there was a field of corn, somehow still alive although he’d gotten the impression no one had been on this property in a while. The house was two stories, a cute little blue ranch-style place, and the barn, painted a passive grey. Above all of it, the Texas sun blazing as hot as a poker. It was hard to believe it was his. It wasn’t exactly what he’d had in mind, what he would have chosen if his ma had handed him a stack of cash and asked him to pick his own place, but he couldn’t complain. It reminded him of home, where he’d just been, without a certain influence looming over everything like ceiling mold. Dell saw his ma in the little flower boxes outside the window and the watering can holding the barn door ajar. He let a smile disrupt the dust settled in the cracks on his face. It was what she had wanted, and he would make it what he wanted, too.

    The house surprised him by being already furnished, mysterious shapes draped in white. Dell supposed the last owners hadn’t wanted to make the effort to take much with them, which was just fine by him, considering the small town of Oxskull he’d driven through on his way here didn’t appear to have a furniture store. The taps seemed to hesitate before spitting out water and the windows squeaked terribly when he opened them in an effort to air out the house. A thick layer of dust coated it all. It was a proper mausoleum of someone’s life. Dell shrugged to himself. He tied a cloth around his mouth and nose and fetched the broom. 

    By the time the sun was setting, his back was aching and he was sweating like a leaky radiator. He’d managed to fix the house up the best he could-all the dust was out, at least, and the furniture undraped. He’d cleaned the layers of grime off of everything and made sure the gas was still working on the stove. Dell was aching to look inside the barn, and kept glancing at it whenever he passed a window on the side of the house that revealed a little snippet of gray. Things to do first, he reminded himself, although his fingers were itching something fierce.

    There was someone supposed to be coming by, a man by the name of Lawrence at the general store, who was taking him enough food to fill the kitchen and supplies they both figured the house wouldn’t have. Dell had asked about the old owners and only got a shrug and a half-hearted answer that made him believe they’d either been social outcasts or died in some scandalous way. It was getting later and later, as the rooster clock in the kitchen told him, still ticking after all of its time alone in this house, the only thing alive other than the mice. He got rather tired of waiting.

    Dell fetched his flashlight out of his truck. Lord, it was dark outside, a sort of pitch black he’d never seen in the city. It would be best to put up some lights so he didn’t trip and kill himself in the dark, out here where no one would find him for a while.

    “Stop that.” he said to himself, firmly, and laughed a little. “Just what dad would want.”

 

    Waving the beam of the flashlight like a sweeping lighthouse, he made his way to the barn, and nearly punted the watering can holding the door open. The rattling sound it made against the wood made him jump a mile.

    “Lord,” he said, waiting for his heart to stop feeling like it was about to leap out of his chest, and kept going.

    It had used to hold livestock, that was for sure, maybe horses. But now it was cleared out and a pile of farming equipment remained in one corner, with a pitchfork and gardening supplies on the far wall. It was spacious enough for two vehicles, and Dell made a mental note to himself to check the newspaper for the weather and park the truck in here. A few bales of hay, of course, and-

    The same rattling noise. Fear jumping into his throat like a terrified frog, Dell swung himself and the flashlight beam around back to the direction he had come. Light filled a ruddy face looking rather bewildered in the doorway.

    “What are you doing out here in the dark, Mr. Conagher?”

    Dell chuckled to himself. When had he become jumpy, like a trigger-happy old man patrolling his garden in the dark?  “You sure gave me a fright, Lawrence.”

    “Sorry. Thought you’d heard me. I couldn’t get the gate open, so I walked the rest of the way.”

    “The latch is kind of sticky. Sorry. Should’ve mentioned it.”

    “It’s no problem, Mr. Conagher. Sticky gates aside, how are you liking the property?”

    “Just fine, thanks. Reminds me of my ma, for sure.”   
  


    “She live nearby?”

    “No. She’s passed.”

    “I’m sorry to hear it, Mr. Conagher. I have all your things.”

    “Thanks for coming out all this way. And please, call me Dell.”

    “No problem at all.” Lawrence gave a gruff smile. Dell kept close to him as they trudged back to the gate and helped him unload the idling truck. Dell liked Lawrence, he supposed, he seemed to be a man that had a sole purpose in life to run the general store, and run it well, and stuck to it. He didn’t seem to be one for rumors, so Dell avoided asking him any more questions about the property or its old owners. When he waved goodbye to Lawrence and finished stacking the last crate of tools in the barn by himself, Dell muffled a yawn and trudged back to the house.

    He paused, flashlight beam settling patiently on the steps he was about to tread on.

    A muddy footprint much larger than his own was on one of the steps.  _ Lawrence _ , he thought to himself,  _ must have gone looking for me in the house first _ . It was a slow thought that rose hazily to his mind after fighting through the quicksand of fear, and Dell shook his head. “Won’t do no good to be skittish out here,” he told himself, and made his way with a purpose upstairs. He lay awake in the new-old bed for a long time, reading an almanac that had been left in the barn. When he finally shut off the light and listened to the crickets on the warm breeze coming in through the window, Dell burrowed inside of the quilt and closed his eyes. It was his house, his barn. It was his house. It was now his house. 

    When his eyes snapped open past midnight to the far-off howling of a coyote, he knew it was going to be a long night.

 


	4. Chapter 4

    “Hey, Constance,” Lauretta said softly, standing exactly in the center of her doorframe. “Hey, are you awake?”

    “No.” came the muffled answer, from someone who was decidedly awake and choosing to ignore the world under two quilts.

    Lauretta moved softly across the snow-white carpet. She was fairly new here, in the Harlow house, this was only her second year, but she felt she had known Constance her whole lifetime. There was something pitiful about the Harlow girl, who existed in this world like a bleak shelf for her parents to push piano lessons onto. When she started she had seen right through Constance, who wore the best mask everyday she had ever seen, and it had taken a while for her to catch the girl in the act of breaking her perfect facade for the two to become friends.

    It hurt her soul to watch this girl.

    “I got the mail from James. I think this is your report card. I can buy you some time, say I misplaced it, but not long.”

    There was no response.

    “What are you struggling with in school? I know I’m just a maid, but I graduated, you know.” she pressed.

    There was no response.

    “Constance, please. Tell me what’s going on. It isn’t like you to fail at anything.”

    There was no response.

    “I’ll hide it in the dumbwaiter.” Lauretta turned to go.

    “Let them see it,” she heard, from a voice that sounded like it was coming out from underwater. “I don’t care.”

    “You do care. You do. It’s okay to have a hard time with school-”

    “Go away. Go away, Lauretta.”

    Stung, the maid paused at the door.

    “I know they’re going to yell, Constance, but don’t think for one minute you’re not smart. Please, ask for help if you need it. It’s important to stay on top of your studies.”

    She was gone before she saw the girl raise a bleary head from under the quilt, eyes shining like river gemstones.

  
  


    They yelled. Oh, they yelled.

    Lauretta lowered the tea towel every single time the glass in the china cabinet rattled, and hunched her shoulders like she was the one in trouble. The cook shook her head and continued peeling potatoes. There was a party tonight, where all of Mr. and Mrs. Harlow’s esteemed friends would come over and laugh their tinkly laughs, and hold their children in front of them all trussed up like Thanksgiving turkeys. Lauretta knew that Mrs. Harlow would scrub Constance’s face with a washcloth like she always did, points of her lavender manicure pressing into the girl’s shoulder, and put her into this dress that looked like a medieval contraption. Then Constance would be kicked underfoot if her smile’s wattage wasn’t high enough, and they would all eat hors d'oeuvres, and laugh the tinkly laugh. Another house she had worked at, the Adlers, when the little boy had done something wrong they would put on these great downturned mouths and go, “Oh, he isn’t feeling well tonight, he’s just taking a nap.” and the little Adler would have a mini, genuine downturned mouth, clutching the banister and watching the party and the platters of chilled oysters go by. But the Harlows used these parties as punishment for Constance, she knew, screaming at her until their throats were raw and then becoming the most gracious parents in the world. It made her heart ache. It was creepy, the first time she saw it, Constance smiling what she thought was genuinely at another boy her age and then rounding the corner into the kitchen and the expression dropping like rain off a window, just gone, this look of utter vacancy replacing it.

    Lauretta would tell her mother about it on the days she was off, curled up in her big bed while the train rattled by the window. “Rich folk are as closest to aliens we’re ever gonna get,” her mother would say, and stroke her hair.

    She wished she could help Constance, and she tried. When the Harlows were out they practiced mathematics and history. Lauretta’s head would ache, trying to remember these things, but she felt a pit of worry gnawing in her stomach that she had to at least try. She wished there was more she could do for the girl, be her friend outside of this house she saw as a prison. Whenever Constance got home from school she was so drained, acting in a way Lauretta had never seen before, that she was just too tired to talk. Constance used to live for Lauretta’s gossip, about her mother’s friends and her on-again-off-again boyfriend, but now she didn’t take any interest, avoiding her homework and sinking into the bed that was like a cloud.

    So before the Harlows got home, Lauretta would sit next to Constance on the bed, pressed and starched apron brushing the tops of her knees, and work on the girl’s homework. She would ask her questions, what’s so-and-so divided by so-and-so, and would chew on the eraser and do it herself. If she didn’t know what was going on with Constance, if the girl wouldn’t talk to her anymore no matter how much she asked, at least she could be her friend, and help her avoid the yelling that would surely make it worse.

    One day they were working on spelling, and Lauretta had brought some cornbread that her mother had sent over with her. The Harlows weren’t permitted to see it. The last time she had brought fried chicken and they had asked the cook what ‘that food’ was doing in their kitchen, and so Lauretta kept it to herself and the staff. She had made it for Constance the way she’d had it as a child, with lots of honey and butter, the heart attack way, and did Constance’s spelling around the girl feeding herself sad, pitiful bites of honey-soaked food.

    “Arachnid.” Lauretta mused to herself. “Which one...B. That’s it.”

    Constance’s hand crept out of its cave under the quilts and reached for her fingers. Lauretta held the hot ones in her cold ones, clutching it tight, and waited.

    “I wish I could come live with you.” Constance said softly, and Lauretta raised her face to the ceiling to blink back thick tears.


	5. Chapter 5

    A week later, the property was barely recognizable. 

    Dell had given everything a fresh coat of paint, and the two structures gleamed for miles. The land was watered, and weak grass and flowery weeds started to crop up around the barn, which was outfitted with workbenches enough toolkits to supply a space station. It felt like home, now, everything clean and dusted and just the right amount of disarray. He had grant money left over from his latest research project that he’d presented to graduate, toolboxes that could have machinery unfold from the inside out. It was a rather nice routine, waking up with the sun, having his coffee and leaving the tv to drone and only the screen door open while he worked in the barn. 

    Lawrence visited, off and on, and Dell grew to like him quite a lot. He was always bringing things that Dell needed right before he could put his finger on it, and interesting little projects. Slowly, Lawrence was indoctrinating him into the town of Oxskull. He’d helped around seven people so far, just little projects to pass the time, things he could do with his hands and knowledge and machinery. It wasn’t a real job, but it was something he loved to do until he could figure the career part out. Lawrence was the one that brought him a goodie basket from one of the older ladies in town whose fence he’d electrified to keep out the coyotes. It warmed his heart to see it. He’d gotten used to the coyotes baying at night, just like the town had gotten used to the man who Lawrence vouched for, the one who was probably smarter than all of them combined and brought machinery into a town that was mostly still sleepy in that area. He had to thank Lawrence for it, as Dell wasn’t sure if he’d ever have been able to get work in the first place, with the way that people were a bit nervous around him and his metal, so he made Lawrence a little scanner that rang like a bell whenever someone entered his shop, and gave him a little icon on a reader in the back of who it was so he knew whether to get up quickly or not. It was becoming a good life.

    He’d been in Oxskull for a few months when the first letter came.

_     Residents of Oxskull,  _ it read in prim script,  _ if you have not yet electrified your fence, please contact Dell Conagher at… _

    Dell was still scanning it, welding goggles glinting in the afternoon sun, when Lawrence’s truck eased up to the gate.

    “Not electrified yet, is it?” The man called to him with a wide grin, climbing down from the cabin. “Look atcha! On the county’s roster as the go-to man.”

    “Do they know why the coyote problem is getting worse?”

    Lawrence shook his head. “Getting more bold, they are, attacking livestock. I heard an old fellow two towns over died...well, not from the coyotes. Was running around in the middle of the goddamn night like a possum, tripped on his rake.”

    “Lord. I’ll be busy.”

    “Better than idle,” Lawrence mused, and gently kicked a toolbox. “Fancy contraption. Well, if you need me to order anything for you, just let me know.”

    “Will do. How’s the store?”

    “Fine. Just fine, thanks.”

    “Could it be better?”

    “It’s just a little thing, really. Have you met Marie Fortifan down the road? She has two boys. Both in juvenile detention. They got out the other day, you see, and are taking up old habits.”

 

    “Uh huh,” Dell prompted.

    “Loitering around the store and such. Petty theft. You know the type. I can barely get anything done, my eye on the scanner the whole day. Maybe I’ll send them the way of your electric fence.”

    They both laughed, hands on their stomachs.

    “I should be getting back. Let me know if anything goes missing.” Lawrence added, seriously. 

    “Will do.” Dell said, and lifted a few fingers in a wave as Lawrence got back in his truck, kicking up a furious dust storm back on the way he had come. 

  
  
  



	6. Chapter 6

    It was one of the first times she had ever felt something real and ugly, and so it would forever be cemented into her memory as her being dragged by the ankle into this world, the real world, where people were forced to feel things. The whole way to school she had wished to escape through the air vents in the car onto the slush-filled street below. With every punctuated word in her mother’s high, shrill voice, Constance felt the burns forming and wounds opening on her back. When she was young, she used to feel something boiling in the pit of her stomach, questing to get out and be heard, but that had been shaken out of her like every other emotion.

    “It’s like, are you  _ stupid _ ? Have you been cheating in school this whole time and got caught just now? Constance, you’re supposed to be smart. I’m not paying this much for you to be stupid.”

    That was a question, then. Constance let her head recline against the seat and pondered it. She had learned to memorize, all right, to spit things back out as they had been taught to her. Lauretta was intelligent. She had all of these tips and tricks for spelling she’d figured out for Constance, and had a instinctual way with cooking where she knew if things were done by smelling them or if something was going to curdle. But Constance didn’t have that. She had nothing like that. She just memorized and played piano, which was really just more memorizing. She couldn’t write her own music or anything. Maybe she really was dumb. There was this district initiative where they should ask questions on tests that really made you think, and it wasn’t something you could memorize to prepare for, and she had failed the statewide testing. Those results Lauretta could not delay.

_    “So what if you’re dumb?”  _ Seth had said, when he called her house after school one day and she didn’t feel like talking much.  _ “I’m dumb. My dad is dumb. But we’re happy. We’re dumb together. You and I can be dumb together. _ ”

    He found her in the bathroom, dabbing a scraped knee with some soaked paper towels. 

    “You’re not supposed to be in here,” she said, thickly.

    “Screw that. What happened? Let me, let me help.”

    “Seth.” she said.

    “You’ve gotten blood on your pants. Ripped them, too. Your mom is gonna be mad.”

    “Seth.” she said.

    “Shut up. Let me help you. Let’s go to the nurse.”

    It hit her then as he tried to pull her up with his weak arms off the tile, a heavy feeling in her throat and chest and head, her mother yelling and making her feel like a turtle inside of its shell because what she’d said right before Constance got out of the car was just  _ cruel _ , she still couldn’t believe it, and she’d tripped on a rock and scraped her knee and made eye contact with her mother through the window and then she just drove away as Constance sat on the ground and blood welled out of her knee. It hit her then, and she howled.

    “What, what’s wrong? Constance, you’re scaring me.”

    “She said,” she started, choking on her own breath, “She said I can’t hang out with you anymore.”

    Seth went still.

_ It’s that boy, isn’t it, the one that’s always calling my house asking for you. I’ve seen him in his ratty clothes and those teeth. He’s no good, and now he’s influencing you to stray from your studies, and be a vagrant like him and his family. Do you want that, Constance? Do you want that life under a bridge? He’s no good. I don’t want you two hanging around anymore, do you hear me? If I catch you with that boy, you’ll really get it. I’ll tell the principal. I’m serious. Keep away from people like him, and find other friends. _

    “Oh.”

    She felt like something in her eyes had burst, she was like a broken faucet, and like she was going to throw up. Constance blindly clung to Seth, to the holes in his shirt, and cried for fifteen years of life. 


	7. Chapter 7

    There was a prickly feeling starting on the back of his neck, like twenty mosquitos settling down for a feast, and Dell hurriedly wiped some of the cold sweat away.

    “Just misplaced it.” he muttered to himself. “Just misplaced it, that’s all.”

_     Let me know if anything goes missing. _

    He was being silly. Paranoid. His workbench was crowded, after all, the blueprints to the toolboxes were probably just under some welding goggles or wrench prototype. They could have fallen behind the table, or maybe he took them into the house and forgot about it.

    Dell knew it wasn’t any of those things. Those blueprints were his pride and joy, his capstone, not an old scrap of napkin he would scratch his head and do equations on. They were kept in a cylinder that hung exactly in the middle of the cabinet he kept all finished blueprints in, sealed and dated and labeled, he could visualize where it had been in his mind. There were a few other things gone, too, but they were replaceable compared to this. He wasn’t an idiot. There were other copies, those were just the originals. But it was one of the most valuable things he owned. A layman, just looking at it, probably wouldn’t understand how to put it together. So it must have been someone that knew what they were, their value, someone that had either tracked him all the way from his university or figured out who he was. Dell felt ill. He was trying to keep a quiet life.

    “I could have misplaced them,” he said to himself, alone in the vast barn.

    “Hey, Dell.” Lawrence said comfortably, looking up from his newspaper.

    “Hey.” Dell answered, sliding onto the barstool next to him.

    “Getcha anything?” asked the friendly bartender.

    “Uh, a beer. Please. Thanks. Yeah.”

    Lawrence looked at him sideways. “You all right, Dell?” 

    “Fine.”

    “You’re sweating like a stuck pig.” his friend observed, pulling Dell’s own handkerchief out of his overall pocket and handing it to him. “Sure you should be out of bed if you’ve got a fever?”

    “It’s not that.”

    “What, then?’

    Dell decidedly waited until his beer was on the counter and the bartender had sidled away.

    “Something of mine was taken, Lawrence. Something very important to me. I’d no idea I should have put it under better security than something out of the weather. No one would rightly... _ should _ know what it means. What it means to me, and literally. Not in another language or anything, but practically...”

    “Those damn kids.” his friend’s barstool shot backwards with a sharp  _ screech _ , and Lawrence slammed his beer down on the counter. “I’ve had it-”

    “Wait. Wait, Lawrence. I appreciate the sentiment. But really, I’m baffled. To the layman, it’s…” Dell gesticulated. “Gibberish. They couldn’t have known what it really was.”

    “So you think someone paid them to grab it.”

    “I really have no idea. I’m just asking for an extra eye out for it, is all.”

    “No worries, Dell. I’ll even inform the sheriff. We’ll get your blueprints back.”

    “Thanks, friend,” he said, and took a welcome swig of his chilly beer. 


	8. Chapter 8

    She was squeezing her manicured carefully almond-shaped fingernails so hard into her palm blood was welling up around the existing salmon pink.  _ This was a mistake. _ It was instinctual, primal, to run. But she hadn’t gone far, like an idiot, and now she was looking over her shoulder every five seconds for the police her mother had surely called. Constance had never been here before, under the big steel bridge where the cars screamed like stuck pigs when they roared overhead. The muddy river hung low and thin, grudging along, lining the homeless camps that had been taken down and put back up countless times. Seth had said, once, that he had an uncle there. Of course there was no way she knew what he looked like. But when she needed to run for some reason she felt like it might be the one place she’d never been that her mother would never find her.

_     Keep moving _ . People were staring at her. She could have handled insults, but they just stood there and looked at her go by like she was being pushed by a strong wind. Too fast to really intake faces, Constance swept her eyes over eyes, looking for a hint of an older Seth in a face. She found it in the maw of a toothless old woman, who smiled at her and raised a chipped mug.

    “Are you lost, honey?”

_     Would they call the police on me? Probably not _ .

    She kept going.

    It was summer. It was supposed to feel exciting and fresh and new. 

    Constance had run like she’d never before like a bat out of hell, leaving the receiver dangling from its cradle in her tepid home.

_     “...Constance? Constance?” _ The advisor was endlessly repeating.

 

_     Constance, you stupid dumb bitch, how could you fail your exams and even have the nerve to be alive, how do you have the nerve to exist _ .

    She knew the word her mother would scream at her. It was probably the same thing Lauretta would ask her, in a different tone of voice.  _ Why? Why? _ She didn’t know. She had just failed. She had just failed.

    Seth failed things all the time. 

    Constance had Satan incarnate waiting for her at home, with its icy lilac manicure, and its shrieking, and its forced-upon-her music lessons, and its hors d'oeuvres. It was so terrifying in that moment that the scratches on her arm from the lilac manicure seemed to glow poker-hot, and it had just spread to her feet, and she had just run. Her mother used to tell her that running away would never solve anything. At school, they said it was because your problems don’t go away no matter how fast you run. At home, her mother said it was for all kinds of reasons. 

    I wouldn’t even have the time to look for you.

    I wouldn’t look for you if you’re going to waste my time in the first place.

    If you want to run away so badly, then you should be allowed to try to make it on your own before you see how stupid you are.

    If you’re dumb enough to run away, you deserve whatever happens to you.

    Do you know how embarrassing that would be for me, to be the only one in this neighbourhood that has a child that runs away?

    Constance hadn’t thought about it. She knew she had no money of her own except for the spare change in her piggy bank. Her mother bought everything. She had nowhere to go, as Seth’s family couldn’t afford another mouth to feed, and she didn’t know how to get to Lauretta’s apartment without taking a lot of subway lines, which required money. Lauretta would probably lose her job if she helped Constance. She hadn’t thought about it. She had just run, because the threats her mother made about never letting her talk to Seth again or being grounded for the whole summer or them moving away, just the two of them, was too much to bear. She thought about her father, who sat there like a sack of potatoes all the time, eyes flicking back and forth helplessly between Constance and her mother like watching a doomed tennis match. No. It wasn’t helpless. He deliberately was passive, passive in her life and in his own, passive and spineless and weak.

     She squatted among starving reeds and stuck two fingers into the soft mud. It was a pleasant feeling, fulfilling some absent childhood need. 

    Maybe her mother wouldn't  look for her. Maybe she would and then forget, or decide that life was just fine without Constance in it. No. It would be nice, but she knew her mother. Out of obligation to the concerned neighbourhood and the police, she would pretend to care where her daughter went. She would only mourn after precisely one year.

    Constance thought about it, and as she was thinking about it, it fell dark.

 


	9. Chapter 9

    It was a fine afternoon, with a breeze blowing through Oxskull like it had just been opened to the rest of the world. It was perfectly noon and the townspeople went about their business. Dell should have been going about his business. It was just the small, minor, simple thing that he could not force himself to get out of the chair he was like stone in on Lawrence’s store’s porch, practically welded to it, one eye rolling behind his goggle to get better peripheral vision through the window. Dell didn’t hear Lawrence step out onto the porch and regard him, phone receiver clutched in hand. The shopkeeper looked at him, clammy and pale, fingers tapping a grave into his knee.

    “Dell. I’ve just gotten off the phone with the sheriff.”

    “And?”

    “There’s been other things around Oxskull missing. Don’t you worry, they’re going to talk to Marie and the boys this evening.”

    Lawrence waited for the slouch of relief. It didn’t come.

    “It should be all okay, now. Don’t worry.” he said again, as a few gnats buzzed over Dell’s head.

    “I shold be getting home. Left a mess, looking for them.”

    He’d been wracking his brain nonstop for who it could have been. Dell had firmly decided it was impossible for the boys to know themselves what the blueprints meant. He had taken all the working prototypes he had and put them under his bed. Someone else must have paid them off to take them, with careful directions. When he was completing his eighth PhD there had been a break-in to one of his fellow graduate’s homes, and valuable things were taken. Dell had heard they’d recently turned down a few offers for work and went to a different company instead. It made him sweat. How many letters and calls had he not returned from companies that he had no idea of their real intention, of how much fine print he would sign that any invention of their employees’ became theirs? 

    There was no way to know. It made his throat sore. 

    It must have been about six in the evening when his eyes snapped open, instantly attuned to the sounds that were coming from the barn. Rustling. Moving. With a dry mouth and roiling stomach Dell retrieved his shotgun strapped over the empty fireplace and made his way carefully outside. He must have fallen asleep in his recliner, like a foolish old man. Well. The wool wasn’t pulled over his eyes anymore. Dell licked his lips and reached out with one hand to pull the barn door open, shotgun braced against his chest. He felt a wild sort of desperation when there was no pallid face staring back at him, caught red-handed. He had  _ heard it _ . He wasn’t insane. He advanced into the barn, quickly, throwing a glance over his shoulder at the still-closed blueprints cabinet. Closed and locked.  _ What? _

    A skittering, crashing noise, and commotion as a scrap bin budged and things were knocked over inside of it. Shaken, Dell fired the shotgun, spraying bullets into the dirt, right as a dirty orange tabby burst out of the bin and yowled, flying at lightspeed out of the barn. He sat there for a minute, hand over his heart. This was it, wasn’t it? The decline of his great mind into paranoia. This was what he’d become. He almost shot a goddamn cat.

    Dell had taken down the clock. He worked in a sort of damned frenzy, ignoring the pain that blossomed in his bent back. A bright burst of light here and there as he welded. Off-rhythm beeping. A screen coming to life. The dust settled in the lines in his face misted down as Dell cracked a smile. There. It was done. A motion-sensor with a set of discreet beepers for around the house if it went off. He could finally get some goddamned rest.

    That evening, he sat in the recliner with a cold beer, surveying his land like a fat king. The beeper placed above the fireplace just below the shotgun was reassuringly silent. Outside, the electrified fence cracked like a whip to life.

  
  
  
  
  



	10. Chapter 10

    Constance didn’t know what to expect.

    It was a sort of very-important-person situation, whistling along in the back of an ambulance, cars pulling over to the side of the road to let them pass. She had never gotten somewhere so quickly before without her mother’s cursing out of other drivers and swerving. There was a possibility her mother may never curse again. Constance didn’t know what would happen next. She didn’t know how they would treat her-she looked like a child, in her ruffled and stained pink skirt. Maybe they would treat her like fine china. But hadn’t she crossed the threshold of porcelain? She saw it, in the newspapers, where there was a certain point that they tried you as an adult and didn’t hide your name and stopped pretending like you were a little kid and put you in an adult prison. Where was the line, had she crossed it? Was she beyond porcelain and onto stone?

    An hour or two later. The policeman had bought her a sticky blueberry muffin and some hot chocolate from the cafeteria. He stood with his hand on the side of her bed. It was the first time she’d been in a hospital, and it was scarier than she ever thought simply going to the hospital could be. They had gone through the emergency room, where ambulances go, and she had seen a nurse with her fingers around a man’s neck and red, red blood squirting out from underneath her hand. Lots of shouting. Code words. Were there code words for  _ you’re going to prison _ ? The policeman had been with her in the ambulance. The policeman had followed them into a room in the emergency center where they examined her, and poked her leg. A crispy smell filled the room, and the acrid stench of burnt hair. They told him to leave. He raised a hand to his lips and talked to one of the nurses in a low voice. They didn’t ask him to leave again.

    “Don’t push it,” said the night nurse, who was a portly woman with an accusing gaze. “I’ll be back in fifteen minutes and that’s all the time you’ve got for today.”

    Her arm was stinging a little from the needle in it. Constance rolled her head back and forth on the soft pillow. The policeman didn’t say anything at first.

    “Your father is on his way, Constance.”

    Her left leg was twice the size of the right one, with all of the gauze and bandages on it. The night nurse poked her head back in. “Call for you.”

    She closed her eyes for a minute and then he was back. “The maid on shift at your home said that your father is in the middle of something and can’t make it for a few hours. She’s offering to come instead. Would you like that?”

    “Yes.” 

    “Do you feel up to answering some questions for me?”

    “Is my mother fine?” 

    Constance really asked because she knew she should. She was thinking about honey-soaked cornbread, and the color of the sun on Earth, blossoming orange and red like a sunset over the horizon.

    “She’s in the intensive care unit right now. I will keep you updated, all right?”

    She closed her eyes and did not open them again.

    Pressure, on her chest. Constance opened her eyes. There were fewer nurses in the hallway, and a head of hair rose to reveal shining eyes.

   “Oh, Constance,” Lauretta said softly. She reached below Constance’s chin. “I promise, when you’re out of here, I’ll take you for a really nice haircut and ice cream.”

    Some of the burnt hair flaked off onto Lauretta’s fingers. 

    “Haircut?”

    “Your hair was burnt in the accident.” Lauretta told her quietly. “And your leg.”

_     Accident. _ Constance pondered the word.

    “Don’t worry about anything. You’ll look so cute with shorter hair, and your leg will heal up fine, I’m sure. A plastic surgeon is coming to visit you today to look at your leg. Realistically, you might have some scars. But it’s okay. It’s fine. Don’t worry. It could have been so much worse.”

    “My mother?”

    “Catherine is still in the ICU.”

    “What happened?”

    “To her? Oh, I’m not sure if I should be the one telling you this.”

    Constance thumped her hand a few times on the bed insistently.

“She...she was burnt, very badly, much worse than you. A lot of smoke and things got down her throat and lungs, so she can’t talk very well right now. The bottom part of her face and her chest and arms are...not so good. I went to see her when you were sleeping, after I got here. Your father is with her. Don’t worry. Constance, please, tell me what happened. The police are wanting to ask me questions, and I don’t know what to tell them. You can talk to me.”

    The truth, she thought, was hotter than any fire.

    “No.”

    Lauretta controlled her face.

    “You’ll have to talk to the police. Someone. If you talk to me, I can help you with what to say.”

    “You won’t like me anymore.”

    “Constance. There are things that could make me not like you. But I love you. You’re my friend. Love doesn’t go away so easily. It sticks around after things like this. I wish I could talk to the police for you, but you must. Let me help you.”

    “Okay,” Constance said, and swallowed.

_     It was dark, and she had been running through grass and fallen branches, tripping once or twice. Her breath was coming out of her chest like someone crushing an accordion. _

_     “Constance!!” her mother shrieked like a banshee from the road. _

_     Her skirt was stained and ripped and she was clutching a plastic bottle of gasoline. Its smell was filling her nose, acrid and horrible and it was probably letting her mother follow her. But she didn’t let go because every time her mother got a little too close Constance squirted it at her feet and her mother backed off. Gasoline on her mother’s nice shoes would not come off. _

_     She’d been given the gasoline by the old, toothless woman, who told her it was for the bonfire tonight. It was certainly night. She had awoken from her sleep like she’d been slapped, the sound of her mother’s breath whistling between clenched teeth like icewater on her head.  _

_ There was the bonfire, in an alleyway sharply to her left. It was sun on Earth, blossoming yellow and orange and red, hot on her face as she got closer. _

_     “CONSTANCE!!!” _

_     Past the fire, the dark alley wall looming up in front of her out of the night barely ten feet from the old oil drum. No one was there. It was still early, the fire gathering strength. She whipped her head back and forth. Surrounded. Her mother’s heels, coming up behind her. They stopped before the fire.  _

_     “You little bitch. Get back here, I can’t believe you. I’m going to lock you in the attic for the rest of the summer-” _

_     A horrible, sweltering rage was making her ears feel like they were stuffed with cotton. Her hands were working on their own and they squeezed the bottle. On autopilot, into the fire, the stream arcing over and at her mother’s face, the fire leaping up to lick it and the whole thing a giant tongue of flame into her mouth. A terrible, bloodcurdling, raw screaming, and that sound was worse than anything she’d ever heard. Constance panicked. She bolted towards her mother and her shoe caught on a rock. Falling, falling, her shoulder slamming into the barrel. The whole thing tipping over, fire on the ground, fire catching on gasoline, and Constance could only think to jerk her head up and away from the fire. She was on her side, one leg on the ground, and before she blacked out she stared at the smoke coming from her mother’s mouth. _

 


	11. Chapter 11

    Dell slept like a corpse. He’d gotten used to the howling of the coyotes and other sounds that came with slightly being in the middle of nowhere. New was the motion sensor and his shotgun above the headboard, his bona fide melatonin. The sensor was blissfully silent all night. He was waiting on the porch with some iced tea, drumming his fingers on his knee, when the sheriff pulled up to his property. Dell set his drink down, ice clinking in the glass like windchimes, and dusted himself off to meet him.

    “You look rested,” the man commented kindly, stepping down from the truck cabin. The sheriff was a tall, lanky man with a pressed uniform and deep laugh lines Dell could see around his sunglasses.    
    “Am.”

    “I don’t think we’ve been properly introduced. Name’s Will. Been the sheriff here for about thirty-five years. Lovely house you’ve got here, Mr. Conagher.”

    “Thank you. Please, call me Dell.”

    The sheriff nodded and took off his sunglasses, the genuine smile on his face sagging. “I’ll cut to the chase, Dell. I didn’t find anything at Marie’s. Practically begged me to look around her house, couldn’t believe her boys weren’t reformed after their stint. They’re no angels, but I have to admit, I think they’ve learned their lesson.”

    The back of his neck was itching something fierce. Dell’s lips were dry. 

    “Sheriff? May I be candid with you? I think there’s more going on here.”

    “Is that so?”

    “My work that was taken is gibberish to the common man. No offense meant. To know what it means, its true value-I suspect someone paid them to do it.”

    “None taken. I hear you, Dell, but I don’t know what to tell you. Unless you have some evidence.”

     “No. No, I don’t. Just sense,” he curtly finished, and turned back towards his house.

    He spent the rest of his day’s work wallowing in irritation. Did he have to go over there his damn self and confront those kids? Maybe. But the sheriff was right. Without any evidence, they’d probably throw him in jail for harassment. He wished he could talk to his mother. The sun was high in the sky when he heard a truck roll up, spitting gravel every which way. Dell put down his wrench and left the barn, one hand over his eyes.

    Will, the sheriff, stepped down from his truck cabin. 

    “Hello, Mr. Conagher. I apologize it took me so long to get over here.” 

    “Call me Dell.” he said.

    “Sure. I’ll get to the point. I went to see Marie-”

    “Again?” Dell asked, confusion creasing his brow. “Is there new information?”

    A moment passed between them then, long shadows cast from the brim of the sheriff’s hat to the bottom of his sunglasses. A very strange expression came over Will’s face for an instant, something writhing under his skin like a snake shedding its skin, and then it cleared.

    “You must forgive me for repeating myself.”

    “It’s no problem, sheriff.”

    Will gave a nod. “Sorry to bother you. Must be losing my mind, driving all around town for a second time!” 

    “It’s no problem. Glad everything is all right.”

    “See you later, Dell.”

    He was left standing there while Will’s truck chewed up gravel on his way out, and wondered where the conversation would have gone if he hadn’t said anything. Dell’s gaze stayed on the pickup until the sheriff was out of sight, only a dust cloud on the horizon like a snuffed-out cigarette.


	12. Chapter 12

    The house was a tomb, a proper mausoleum, an altar to death. It had never felt like home to Constance, instead rather like a train station, where she passed through nonchalantly on her way to other things. 

    It felt worse now.

    She passed through the living room-the  _ family _ room, as some called it, and traced her fingertips along a marble bust that had a small chip on the backside. It was eerily quiet, made worse by the fact it was the silence that came when people were tiptoeing around. Constance loved the vacuum when her mother wasn’t home, the absence of sound only interrupted by the small noises of laughter and murmurs of talking from the staff cleaning and cooking. Her father had been locked the master bedroom all day, with his lawyer secured in the study, and Lauretta was the only one that seemed to have time for her. Except for now, of course, she was busy trying not to get the staff to commit mutiny. There had been strict instructions from Constance’s mother’s doctors for absolute quiet so she could get as much sleep as possible, and so they were having their meeting in the kitchen with tea towels stuffed under the doorframe, the furthest away from the master bedroom they could be. Every few minutes Constance ghosted to the dining room and pressed her ear up against the door to catch frantic, hushed snippets of conversation. 

    “This house has the devil in it,” someone said. 

    It was all becoming a little much. Constance understood that. She had realized rather passively that there was nothing she could do to make people like her, or understand what had happened. It didn’t help that she didn’t understand it herself. She had definitely said  _ something _ to the police, and to the psychiatrist, and it made sense at the time but it didn’t now. It was fragmented, supplemented by words people gave to her.  _ Abuse. Self-defense. _ She had run away. She couldn't even remember what had tipped the scale. It seemed so unimportant; was it worth all this? The words of the night nurse floated into her head.  _ Bet that was the last straw, wasn’t it? _ She couldn’t remember. She had run away, over something, run to a homeless camp where she thought stupidly she could somehow recognize Seth’s uncle whom she had never met nor seen a picture of. There was going to be a big bonfire and she was going to be included. Constance tried and failed to recover that feeling. It was fleeting, the feeling of being wanted. It was one of the first times she had been kindly included in something. She had the gasoline, and her mother found her somehow. How? She was running, scared, like a gazelle from a lion.

    She was trying to not remember what followed. Absently, her fingers ghosted by her leg. 

    It was all becoming a little much for everyone. The staff walked on eggshells around her and dissonance hummed in the air like a microwave. Lauretta had deep bags under her eyes and conversed with the special nurses that tended to Constance’s mother in a soft, low voice. It was all becoming a little much for her, too. She was in a state of limbo. Constance had only had a brief word from her father to wait until he was finished settling affairs and hospital bills, so wait she did. She wasn’t in prison. She wasn’t sure if she had come close at any point. Whatever Lauretta had told her to say had kept her out of trouble but in with many psychiatrists. Lauretta hadn’t taken her for her haircut yet. The psychiatrists had asked her many questions, mostly about her mother and how she felt about her mother, and there was a lot of hemming and hawing and then she never heard anything back. She hadn’t talked to Seth. The phones in the house had been moved to the study.

    Constance stood at the big window in the dining room and felt the sun on her cheeks. 

    A phone trilling faintly in the kitchen. A minute later and Lauretta edged out over the tea towels, coming up behind her with a new and permanent crease in her brow.

    “Constance,” she said very softly, “Your father is ready to talk to you. Please go up to your bedroom.”

    A chill cascaded down her back. “She’s up there.”

    “Yes.” Lauretta said after a long pause. “Yes, she is.”

    “Do I have to-”

    “Of course not. Just wait in your room.”

    Constance wanted to say more, as Lauretta walked away, but something held her tongue in her mouth. Maybe it was the dark circles under her eyes, or the laugh lines that hadn’t been used in ages. It was her, after all, causing this trouble. It was because of her that everyone was rushing around and the house was so quiet.

    She went upstairs and placed herself on the edge of her bed.

    Her father did not come.

    Constance waited some more. 

    Her father did not come.

    She held her own hand and rose from the quilt, padding softly down the hall. The door to her father’s study was still shut and the only nose was the soft beeping of the machines in the master bedroom. As Constance approached the rolling emotion in her stomach fought harder and harder to spill out of her throat. There was a emaciated thing laying in the bed, a creature that used to be her mother who was damned to lay there on a respirator and wonder if she would ever use her ravaged throat and lungs on her own again. The sheets were draped up to her collarbones, and Constance’s heart fell still for a moment when one wide eye opened, swung around the room like a laser, and settled on her. 

    Constance was frozen for a minute, like she had felt in the alleyway, rooted to the spot like she’d been glued. Her mother’s eye seemed to quake with rage in its socket, and a pathetic hissing noise rose from the bed, something she wasn’t sure belonged to the respirator or her mother. 

    Her father was asleep in his chair next to the bed. Constance’s eyes flicked back and forth from him and her mother as she advanced. The hissing peaked and then broke like snow falling off a mountain, there was a liquidy cough and then silence again.

    “Constance,” her father said, surprised, and she jumped. “Let’s talk in your room.”

    It was later that she realized the conversation they had on her bed was the longest she had ever had with her father, and it would be the last time they spoke more than a few words to each other for the rest of her life. It struck her that he was just as confused as she was, then, sitting and wringing his hands. Constance sat with a straight back. The man next to her could have been a stranger.

    “Constance, I...I wanted to say I was sorry.”

     She blinked. 

    “I had no idea you felt like you were being abused. Your mother has a very special way of showing that she cares, and I know she can be hard on you, but it’s because she cares. You know that, right? Abuse is a very strong  _ adult _ word, honey. All these psychiatrists and lawyers are up in a flurry about it. I’ve been trying to tell them that’s not what you meant. All the same, with your mother...like she is, I guess I’ll be your parent now.”

    A bird chirped faintly from somewhere in the courtyard.

    “Honey, I don’t understand why you felt the need to run away when your mother gave you everything, but I understand you don’t feel like talking. That’s okay.” A few beads of sweat rolled down her father’s pale cheek. “Or why you...did that. If it was an accident or not. I’d really rather not know,” he said, mostly to himself. “What matters is, I’m going to tell you how things will be. The psychiatrists can’t tell me what you talked about, all of it, but I know you’re not in any trouble. You wouldn’t understand the terms they used, but Constance, something is wrong in your brain. Normal children don’t hurt their loving parents. They know it wasn’t with...you know, the intent to seriously hurt your mother, but something in your brain was making you feel like you had to lash out. All of this is going to go away. Don’t worry, all right?”

_     Don’t worry _ . Constance closed her eyes. She felt a summer with Lauretta and Seth on her fingertips, sunlight flooding her cheeks and sticky cornbread on her lips. She would tiptoe past the hiss of the respirator and the rolling eye with the knowledge her mother would probably never speak again, never tell the truth. Constance did know in that instant what the truth was, as her father put it so delicately, sweating through his starched shirt. She had intended to hurt her mother, the creature pushing her into a corner with a rake. Something had snapped, and she was still a little fearful about whatever it was that had caused that rage. By some godlike grace she was skidding along imprisoned, and would finally have a chance to- 

    “Under one condition.”

    Her heart stilled.

    “The court thinks it’s a good idea for you to have a change of environment.”

     “What does that mean.”

    “You’re going to boarding school. In Washington. I know it’s far, but it’s one of the best private schools in the nation. You’ll be away from your mother, this house, your school. It will be a fresh start, all right?”

    Constance gazed at the weak chin of her father and wished for the taste of honey.

  
  



	13. Chapter 13

    He hadn’t slept right in a week.

    Dell would have killed for his mother at his side now. It seemed like her hand floated like oil in water above his shoulder, always moving with but above him. She was in suspension, looking down, holding the answers to his problems in her dry, dead mouth. Out of reach for eternity. He’d never doubted himself like this. Sure, there were moments in college when he was actually stumped on something and couldn’t believe later he didn’t figure it out, but this was different. This was everything. It was him as a person and him as an engineer. His work and himself were in question, and it was a kind of unbalanced turmoil that felt like rolling, suffocating nausea. Dell tried to tell himself in another day or two he’d have figured out the problem and laughed it off, but it wasn’t coming. The Texan limped through every day, feeling as if he was about to be shot in the spine.

    Could he be unsettled so easily that he completely forgot how to be competent?

    He’d unassembled the thing a million times. There was nothing wrong with it. Absolutely nothing. But there must be. He couldn’t be crazy. He even built a second one, with new parts-it wouldn’t shut up, either, like the insistent cry of an alarm clock reminding him he was missing out on something. There was nothing wrong with it. It was a sensitive motion detector, but not  _ that _ sensitive to catch goddamn dust floating through the air. It must be something of the sort. There was no other explanation. It would suddenly light up with a sharp, shrill beep and go for hours on end, to the point where he’d stash it under the mattress, fingers stuffed in his ears. The damn thing wouldn’t shut up. Then, all at once, the muffled beeping would stop, and he’d take it out, holding it by the tips of his fingers like it was poisonous. Silence, for half a day. Then it would start up again. In the middle of the night or the heat of midday, it didn’t matter.

    He replaced every unit in the setup. Scanners and detectors. Dell debated taking the whole thing down and setting it alight, but he couldn’t bring himself to. There was something about it nagging at him like a toothache. He knew his skill. But there was no goddamn explanation.

    There was one. 

    Dell slept in the barn one night, shotgun across his lap.

    Sure as sunshine, sometime around three in the morning, it went off again, an earsplitting cry. He almost shot his goddamn foot off trying to get up, whipping his head back and forth like a sprinkler.

_     Reeeeeeeee…… _ it cried insistently. 

    The deep, purple bags under his eyes served as valleys for hot tears.

_     “DAMN IT ALL TO HELL!”  _ He screamed, throat scraped raw with desperation.

    Dell took hold of the butt of his shotgun and swung it around like a flyswatter in front of him, cutting empty air into ribbons. Droplets of sweat flew from his brow. When the little energy he had finally left him, he stood there heaving huge breaths like he’d just been drowning.

    With a heavy soul, Dell trudged over to the monitor and ripped the batteries out of the back of it, the beeping dying abruptly and mercifully. It still rang in his ears for a minute as he processed the state of his own mind, contemplating his insanity. That had to be it, then. He was imagining it. It seemed impossible that something that was leaving an internal imprint on his eardrums was fake, but he had no other explanation for it. There was nothing out there.

    Just him.

    Dell knew he should get some sleep. He collapsed into bed in his undershirt, too exhausted for proper pajamas, and lay there with the weight of the world on his eyelids, waiting for them to close. One shrouded pupil gazed at the shotgun laying mournfully in the doorway like a guard dog. 

    As he drifted off to unconsciousness, his brain fluttered about, replaying the memory of swinging the shotgun like a sword, and the feeling of the tiniest amount of resistance, like it was catching on a curtain. His brain dismissed it. It was the energy leaving his arms that made it feel like in that moment it was just a little bit harder to push. 

    There was nothing out there. Just him.

    Dell had a habit of walking the perimeter of the electric fence with his coffee in the morning. Sometimes Lawrence would come before he opened the general store and stroll with him, enjoying the sun on his back. When he rattled up in his truck, stepping down from the cabin to open the gate, he stood there with billowing dust clouds around his boots listening for the hum of the live fence. It was there, for sure, so he placed his hand on the thick rubber grip to tug open the gate. Lawrence paused, hand hovering over the truck’s handle. Dell was usually waiting for him on the porch. Dell would usually call him to order supplies or to chat once every few days-it had been four. The house was silent and gray and the vacant porch looked like a gaping mouth.

    Trailing a hand across the hood of Dell’s truck, Lawrence looked in the barn. Machinery sat on its back with wires splayed into the air like a mutilated carcass, various nuts and bolts and tools strewn everywhere like a hurricane had been through. The workbench looked as if everything had been swept off it. Lawrence frowned. This kind of disarray was very unlike Dell. Normally, it wasn’t the cleanest place in the world, but it had an organized chaos vibe to it. Just like the man himself. A dusty orange barn cat hissed at him from the rafters as he nudged a piece of shattered glass with his foot.

    He looked behind the house, where a rusty spigot was dripping like the ticking of a clock.

    “Dell?” Lawrence called out as he stepped from the porch into the cool shade of the first floor, removing his wide-brimmed hat. He gazed around the living room with mournful eyes. The house seemed like it was stuck in the past, frozen like the dust hanging suspended in the air, lifeless without the occupant’s guitar tunes floating through the hallways. His foot creaked on the lowest stair, a warning squeak resounding up to the second floor. “I’m coming up.”

    He left the bedroom for last, one eye on the lump of quilts and sheets, hoping the noise he was making would prevent him from nastily surprising his friend. When he couldn’t avoid it anymore Lawrence placed one hand on the blankets to shake them lightly, to rouse Dell from something he wasn’t sure of.

    “Come on, now, you’ve got to keep working. It’s important stuff, Dell, you best get back to it.”

    His fingers touched each other on either sides of patterned fabric. Lawrence frowned and tore off the quilt. The bed was as vacant as a robbed grave. So he sat on the porch, then, while the sun climbed in the sky, and let the phone mounted in Dell’s kitchen cease its endless ringing for its owner. Lawrence drummed his fingers on his knee. He debated calling the sheriff. It looked awful suspicious, the barn ransacked and all. But he knew Dell. Wherever the engineer had to go to so suddenly, it must have been important, and as his good friend it would only make trouble to raise a ruckus. Nothing important was taken, after all, if something really did happen.

    Not yet.

  
  
  
  



	14. Chapter 14

    Lauretta had let her eat ice cream out of the tub a few occasions in her life, particularly when she was notably upset over something and had been crying for hours. She would always hand it over, lips pursed, with the knowledge it was the only thing that would get Constance to stop.

     “I know you’re manipulating me,” she would say, wagging her finger. “You’re too smart for your own good. And too cute.”

    They had just finished the haircut Lauretta had promised, where to save her friend from a lopsided bob the maid had gotten her to agree to a pixie cut. Constance couldn’t stop threading her fingers through the short length. 

    “It looks adorable. Dangerously cute. Seriously. If you’re worried about it, it’ll grow back! It’s all part of the fresh start.” Lauretta’s hands tightened around the refrigerator door. “How is your leg feeling?”

    Her leg was feeling fine. It was out of most of the dressings-she was stuck with a thin bandage for a while-and itched sometimes. Sometimes she stared at the wicked burn scar at night with wide moon eyes. Other burns she didn’t really realize were there were less severe-there was one on her arm, too, where she had fallen, and small ones dotting her abdomen.  _ You can wear pants _ , Lauretta had promised, flipping through the school uniform catalog for Northbrook with her.  _ Or skirts with tights. It’s all part of the fresh start. No one has to know unless you want them to _ .

    “Ice cream,” she asked wistfully, as Lauretta had also promised.

    “I’ll make it for you. Just a little.”

    Constance knew she hadn’t been crying but felt a little miffed when the bowl with a single, sad scoop was delivered to her. Lauretta went back to rummaging through the refrigerator. 

    “More?”

    “No. You haven’t had dinner yet.”

    “But-”

    “God,  _ Constance! _ ” Lauretta cried, wheeling around with an urgency that made Constance drop her spoon on the floor with a clatter. “You have to learn to take care of yourself at some point! Adults don’t eat ice cream before dinner! Well, they do, but they eat healthy enough the rest of the time to make it okay. You get the point!”

    “But I’m not an adult yet. I’m fourteen.”

    “It’ll come up sooner than you know it. Being an adult isn’t just an age, Constance. It’s…knowing how to eat right when your parents aren't there to tell you. It’s being grown-up about hard things, like going across the country for boarding school.” Lauretta pinched the bridge of her nose. “You’re going to grow up sooner than I ever wanted you to. But this school is important, okay? Somewhere is willing to give you a chance for a fresh start. Where you can be a kid.”

    “You just told me not to be a kid.” Constance piped up, puzzled.

    Lauretta heaved a great sigh. “It’ll make sense later. I promise. Now eat your tiny scoop of ice cream.”

    A while before the while they needed to leave to have ample time at the airport, Lauretta took her to see Seth before she went. Constance couldn’t stop fidgeting in the backseat of Lauretta’s little beat up car that made strange noises. She had barely spoken to her friend; it felt like it had been eons since they’d last seen each other. Lauretta had called him for her when she was in the hospital, but the doctors had been strict while she was undergoing her psychiatric examinations about visitors. It was a little, nagging thing, that it hadn’t been at the front of her mind when she got home. Lauretta had suggested letting him know she was leaving a week or two before, so they could get together. Unbeknownst to Lauretta, Constance hadn’t actually told him. She did it right before she got in the car. Ripping off a band-aid. She had soaked in Seth’s silence on the phone like a sponge.

    She wanted to feel his pain over the phone, leeching it out until Lauretta called her.

    “I’ll be back soon. I have to pick up your uniform from the post office. Have fun, okay?”

    Constance stood on the curb and waved as Lauretta drove off. Seth was waiting for her on the slanted porch, sitting with his elbows on his knees, making circular imprints of a brilliant pink. She stood over him like an executioner.

    “How’s your leg?”

    A gust of wind picked up, sending leaves like spears through the sparse grass.

    “Constance,” Seth asked, a little uncomfortably. “Why are you being so mean to me?”

    “Mean?” she asked, eyebrows raising so far they almost disappeared into her hairline.

    “Yeah. I get you’ve been in the hospital and stuff, but you could have called me when you got out. You’ve known you’ve been leaving for Washington for weeks, right? I thought you were coming over to play. My mom made cookies.” Seth searched her eyes for any sign of life, tears threatening to spill across his cheeks. “We used to talk about everything. I didn’t even know you wanted to run away. You could have called me. You could have called me before you hurt your mom.”

    She, simply, had nothing to say to him.

    Seth stood up and scrubbed his eyes with the back of his hand. He didn’t look at her anymore. “I got you a present, a long time ago. My mom said that it’s in ‘bad taste’ now. And I know you don’t smoke or anything, but it was my grandpa’s. The one that fought in the war. I wanted you to have it, since you’ve been through a lot.”

    He handed her a bundled up tea towel out of his pocket. Constance unwrapped it. It was a battered metal lighter. She flicked it on and off, resisting dropping it onto the grass for the slightest second when the flame grew against her hand.

    Seth’s shoulders drew close together. “Sorry. My mom was right.”

    Constance could hear the dying noises of Lauretta’s car coming around the block.

    “Your hair looks pretty,” he tried. She filled with the same insurmountable rage that had forced her hand to arc gasoline into her mother’s throat, and Constance hurled the lighter at Seth with all her might. It hit him on the nose, drawing blood quick and fast, and he cried out, looking at her with anguish.

    “Burn in hell,” she hissed, and wheeled around to fly to Lauretta like a chicken out of its coop. Constance avoided Seth’s tearstained face in the back window as they pulled away.

    “Have a nice time?” Lauretta asked plaintively.

    “Yes.” Constance answered stoically, the image in the rearview mirror as dead to her as her mother.

  
  
  
  
  
  



	15. Chapter 15

    Dell wondered, sometimes, if he was a fool for leaving Bee Cave.

    It felt like on heaven on Earth to him, wheat licked by sunshine blowing in the wind as one great ripple, a sunset the colors of ripe fruit bathing the sky. There was his mother’s old house, which had been a fortress of his childhood and when things were still civil with his father. Practically frozen in time, it stood in the late afternoon like a lighthouse, a beacon. His mother had been buried under the big tree in their backyard, by the swing Dell had to be pried off of as a child. Her headstone was simple. There were fresh flowers in a mason jar when Dell trudged up to it, scuffing up dust like an ashamed child. 

    “Hey, ma,” he told it, and gazed at the sky. Dell placed his own sprigs of wisteria across the grave, kneeling in the sparse grass. There was suddenly so much to say that he didn’t know exactly where to start. He wondered what she did and didn’t see, what she was and wasn’t proud of. Dell was pretty sure he looked a damn fool.

    “I wish you were here.”

    He knew what she would say.  _ I’m always with you, Dell _ . It was what she had said to him his third day of college, when he couldn’t maintain the lie that being away from home for the first time didn’t make him cry like a baby. She’d encouraged him to stay, give it a try, even though he was sure she was holding back tears, too.

    “I don’t know what to do, ma. Think I’m going crazy, or Oxskull is haunted. Don’t want to turn tail and run, but suppose I already did. I know there’s something else going on. Lord, every sensible bone in my body is telling me I’m missing something. Spooks ain’t real, and I’ve always been able to trust my own eyes. But I’ve gone over it a thousand times, ma! There ain’t anything else it could be but my own damn self.”

    He released a sigh that sounded millions of years old.

    “You would know what to do. You always knew what to say to set me straight.”

    Dell had already been set straight last evening, all right, by the person he least wanted to see in the world, aiming a shotgun at his throat.

    “You best have a reason why you’re on my property,” his father said dangerously, the beam of his headlamp swinging around until it settled in Dell’s eyes. Cold metal pressed under his chin like the sickle of the reaper. 

    “Son?” 

    The elder Conagher lowered the gun from its spot against his shoulder hesitantly. He thumbed up the headband of the light.

    “Son, what are you doing in the dirt in the middle of the night like a goddamned raccoon?”

    Dell didn’t remember much, only being dragged to the house by the scruff of his neck and being sprayed down in the yard with something he was pretty sure was a pressure washer. His father brought him oatmeal the next morning, and sat with him until he woke up. Dell knew, then, that he must be dying.

    “Tell me what’s going on, Dell. Are you in some kind of trouble?”

    He wasn’t sure how he even got to Bee Cave. His father couldn’t find his truck. It was a possibility that he had hitchhiked to a highway near the property, stumbling around in the dark until he tripped a motion sensor that alerted the owner of the land he was on. It was ironic that the thing that had been his downfall had saved him. His father told him he looked as if he’d been dragged backwards through a hedge. It was convenient for Dell that the person to see him at his lowest was his father.  _ Maybe you should see your ma _ , he’d said, and so the engineer did exactly that in the coming days. His father left him mostly alone, bringing him meals, watching him with narrowed eyes like a patrolling hawk on his solitary paths to his mother’s grave and back to bed. He felt rattled. Exhausted. His gut swam with nausea. Dell had been very sick, once, as a child. It felt like this. Being utterly drained reminded him of when he felt his eyes receding in their sockets and repeatedly asked his ma if he was dying.

    “No, Dell,” she’d chide, wiping his brow with a kitchen towel, “You’re just passin’ through the reaper’s ravine. Gonna pass like a stubborn mule, but it’ll pass.”

    “Dell?”

    He returned to himself. “I ain’t in trouble.”

    “You say you weren’t runnin’, but boy, you were runnin’. What’s going on?”

    “I don’t rightly know.” Dell said helplessly, throwing his hands in the air. “Half the time I wonder...if I’m being  _ haunted _ , and the other half, that my brain’s just shutting down. The quiet way, not the kind that makes you start talking to dead folks, but the real scary way, where you just fall off the edge quick-like. Half expect the sheriff to show up and shuttle me off. Hell, I don’t even remember how I  _ got _ here.” 

    “What’s been happenin’ that makes you think this way?” his father asked slowly, rubbing the stubble over his chin. “Let me hear it.”

    “Built a motion sensor. Lord, could build ‘em blindfolded, in my sleep, with my foot, you name it.” There was a nod of assent. “Thing started going off all the damn time. Shrill. Boring into my head. Making me feel crazy. Wasn’t sleeping. Of course, there was nothing there. Never anything there. Made sure it was working right and everything. Only the ones in the barn going haywire, like some sort of disease.”

    “You swap ‘em out?”

    “Course.”

    “Check the source of your parts?”

    “Nothing else was acting up, just the sensors. Things use those same parts.”

    Dell’s father gazed out the window, blue-grey eyes flitting back and forth, the only source of life in his face.

    “Just say it. I’m crazy.”

    “No son of mine is crazy,” his father said gruffly. He got to his feet. 

    “You mean you think there’s a mechanical explanation?” The engineer asked.

    His father gazed down on the specks of dust caught in the light, sifting through the barely concealed joy in his son’s tone.

    “No, Dell. I think you’ve been working too hard. Got yourself a little spooked out there all alone in the country. Had a good old-fashioned breakdown. Nothin’ to be ashamed of. Sometimes your brain just...needs a break, and you end up overdoin’ it in the workshop. Happened to me all the time in college.”

    “A breakdown.” Dell repeated.

    “You ain’t crazy.” His father corrected firmly. “Happens to the best of us. Too much strain on your mind.”

    “But somethin’ put it there!”

    The senior Conagher let the silence fill the ringing that was created by the shout. He stood, picked at one of the holes worn into his overalls, and turned to go.

    “I’ll leave you be to relax. It’s what you need, Dell. Lots of rest.”


	16. Chapter 16

    It was the first time she saw that face which would be third in line when she was making her chronological list of hated faces. Constance would not realize that most of her loathing should be directed towards this man until later in her life, when it was very much so too late to do anything about it. 

    He was tall, unlike her father, and had long hair that was slicked back and shone under the airport lighting. There was a little sign in fancy script with her name on it,  _ Constance Harlow _ , and he had this look on his face that was trying to be friendly but made him look rather impatient, or like he was leaning away from someone who smelled badly. Constance visualized him next to a screaming woman in labor like the one she had seen in the hospital, with that tight-lipped impatient sort of smile, eyes wide,  _ this is taking forever _ . She was sure it was not intentional for him to look so impatient. Her plane was on time. He just had that sort of face.

    “I’m Constance.” she told him.

    “Splendid. Nice to meet you! My name is James Kerrington; I work with Northbrook. How was your flight? Have you ever flown before?”

    “No. It was fine.” Constance answered. She had spent most of the time sinking backwards into her seat and fading into the space behind her eyes. A fresh start. It was really going to be a fresh start. Away from her mother. Away from everything that had ever made her feel rotten inside. Was it too late? Was she too rotten already?

     “Let’s get your bags,” he told her cheerfully, and then they were bundled inside his car, and it was raining something furious. “Welcome to Washington.”

    Constance watched him very carefully from the corner of her eye. He decidedly did not cast furtive glances at her like she had thought he would, and slowly, a pool of respect began to bubble up from inside her.

    “What do you do? At Northbrook.”

    “I’m a counselor.” he told her. “Assigned to you for your years at Northbrook. I’d like you to visit me at least once a week, maybe more if you would like. I want to make sure your transition to a new place is as smooth as possible, and that you’re doing okay with schoolwork and making friends.”

    “I’ll be fine,” Constance said carefully, a toe in the water. 

     A smile spread across James’s face. 

    “I’m sure you will be, Constance. I look forward to getting to know you.”

    “Did they tell you to watch me?”

    The smile remained. 

    “Yes. Yes, this is part of the arrangement that was struck up in New York. I’m asking for our time together each week. I would rather not have to demand it.”

    Constance pushed herself back into the car seat and contemplated this for a moment. 

    “Okay.”

    “I will always be honest with you. In return, I hope I can trust you to do the same.”

    The rest of the car ride was silent, but pleasantly so. James turned on the radio and mildly pointed out a few things to her as they passed. He seemed just fine with letting her ruminate.

_     The shoulder of her shirt was soaked with Lauretta’s tears. Her friend, crouched down to her level, gripped her upper arms tightly, and shook her a little, teeth clenched against another sob. _

_     “It’s going to be great. You’re going to be great. Oh, Constance.” _

_     Her father was standing awkwardly to the side like an uninvolved passerby, his hands stuffed in his pockets. He had come with Lauretta to say goodbye, and made a gesture that almost made Constance think he was about to shake her hand, but pulled her into a quick embrace instead. _

_     “Stay out of trouble, kid,” he told her, but not in an unkind way. _

_     “Just remember, it’s a fresh start. You don’t have to tell anyone anything you don’t want them to know. I’ll write every week. I’m sure Seth will, too. But don’t worry about us. You’ll make loads of friends.” _

_     “Goodbye,” she said to Lauretta, and they stood there for a minute with their foreheads pressed together, like two sage old minds.  _

    Constance awoke with a start to a dark and vacant vehicle.

    She fumbled with her seatbelt, ashamed and angry that she had fallen asleep, and whipped her head around to look out the windows. The rain had let up, and through the drizzle she could see they were parked on a patch of gravel in front of a cluster of buildings. Constance craned her neck. They looked rather like churches, all grey brick framed with lush trees, and a few people milled around the wide staircase leading up to the main entrance. In the distance, the massive doors swung open, and a figure trotted back down the stairs and towards the vehicle. Constance sat placidly until James opened the passenger side door.

    “I just finished bringing in your bags. Welcome to Northbrook,” he said with a smile, and offered his hand.

    James allowed her to stand on the gravel for a minute, mist of the rain collecting on wispy frizz raised from her blonde head. There was a lovely smell of something green, and Constance took a deep breath, straining the capacity of her ribcage. Lauretta had suggested she wear her uniform on the plane to help James recognize her and help everything feel more normal, and Constance was glad for it. No one spared them a second glance as the counselor led her into the main hall, a massive affair staffed by two prim ladies wearing spectacles in the front. There were the offices of the dean and most important people in this building, he told her, chin a little high. James pointed out his office to her as they passed it. Constance caught glimpses of wide, flowery courtyards through the wide windows. There were classrooms to see, the whole layout to learn, and when she was getting a bit weary they stopped at the dormitories. She was rather pleased to learn that she had her own room, and all of her baggage was waiting in it. There was new furniture.

     James placed his hand on a pale folder that was resting placidly on her desk. “Fill this out, Constance, and bring it to the front office. There’s things you need to decide. What color curtains, and rug, and everything. Your class schedule is in here, too.”

    She nodded, eyes on the big window. How cold would the glass would feel on her cheek?

    “What am I forgetting...a few things.” he took a seat on her bed. “You’re free to go anywhere you please on campus grounds, but don’t leave without an adult. There are weekend trips to the town just down the road, I’m not sure if you saw it. If you’d like to come, just show up in the front hall at ten in the morning sharp on Saturday and Sunday. You’re free to do shopping or anything, see a movie. Weekends are free for you to use, just make sure you’re studying and doing homework.”

    Something dawned on her, then, and it made the walls close in very fast. 

    “I don’t have any money.” Constance said suddenly.

    “You do. Your father set up an account for you to use. Your schooling and board is paid for, and there’s quite the allowance for spending money. Everything’s in the folder. Anything else?”

    She shook her head.

    “Classes start on Monday. Enjoy your Sunday, tomorrow. You know where to find me if you need anything. Oh, and, how is Friday? For our meetings?”

    Constance held it in her mouth. James was giving her choices as he had all afternoon.  _ Please come to the meetings. When would you like to come to the meetings? How would you like to spend your time? _ They weren’t real choices. They were thinly veiled orders. She was being controlled, herded from one pen to the next like a dumb cow. But it wasn’t his fault, and he was doing the courtesy of asking anyway. She decided she liked James.

    “That’s fine.”

    “Sounds good. See you, kid.”

    James gave her a little wave with his fingers as he got up.

    “James.”

    “Yeah?”

    “How much do people….know about me?”

    He shrugged. “You’re completely uninteresting. Just a transfer from New York. Only the teachers you have for classes know your specific situation, but no other students or staff. Keep your door open, Constance. It’s a friendly floor you’re on.”

    “Thank you.”

    The glass was colder against her cheek than she ever would have imagined. 

 


	17. Chapter 17

    Dell returned to Oxskull when summer was nearly over, the broiling sun finally beginning to stray from its warpath. It was Lawrence who opened the front door of his house before Dell even had a chance to step down from the cabin of his truck, a frilly apron wrapped around his waist like a housemaid, and he gave a hearty wave. When Dell reached the porch, the smell of toasted nuts wafted out of the ajar windows like a soothing aura.

    “Thanks very much for watching the house for me.”

    “My pleasure, Dell. I can’t tell you how glad I am you’re feeling better. Are you cleared to get back to work?”

    When he had called Lawrence to ask him to keep watch over the chains of his sanity in the barn, Dell had said that his father thought it was only a breakdown induced by stress. It was very kind of Lawrence, he thought, that his friend didn’t offer his opinion. He simply recommended Dell see a psychiatrist that could offer his opinion that Lawrence had seen after the death of his son. While the doctor’s diagnosis of a breakdown didn’t initially please Dell, it was sort of satisfying in a way to have a medical opinion. He would always respect another professional that had been through the toil of a lot of school. In this way, he could begin to gather himself and move on, when it wasn’t just the voice of his father, dripping with sympathy he couldn’t stomach.

    “Yes. All cleared. Were there any problems while I was away?”

    “Stray cat was wandering around here; I was wondering if you’d been minding him. Gave him some water and food from the store and got him to stick around.”

    Dell’s face contorted with a mix of emotions, but then it cleared, and he let out a laugh rumbling deep from his belly. “Yeah, I know that cat. Near sent me to an early grave.”

    It was clear Lawrence was confused, but he simply smiled and offered Dell a muffin.

    It was pleasing to have true sparks of inspiration. Even if he hadn’t drawn blueprints against the background of rolling blues on the radio, his usual mental stimulant, it was still like an electric whip being cracked in his mind when he had an idea that could potentially be damn good. It was one of those moments, a rare five-minute rain hammering down against the roof of the barn and reminding Dell he needed to get up there and patch it. The psychiatrist had told him that it was normal for his mind to stray to the security system again, to think about what had happened and try to make up possible explanations, and that he should simply be patient with those thoughts. Dell was patient. But he also had the mind of a tinkerer, and it was damn near impossible to put down a problem that he hadn’t found a solution to. It slunk around his thoughts like a panther. If he had just been able to be faster, to get there before whoever was messing with it somehow got away. If he was able to be quicker, he could maybe just catch a  _ glimpse _ -

    Dell sat back in his chair, arms behind his head, pencil in his mouth, and let the floodgates of his mind open. 

    He was perfectly serene, and then a hurricane of activity, scrambling for his notebook and another stub of a pencil behind his ear, trapped in the band of his welding goggles. A beastlike smile spread across his face. Oh, what he’d been working with was practically  _ baby _ technology; he was about to give Lawrence a hell of a job trying to track down the materials he would need for this beauty. Lord, he’d buy Lawrence the finest imported beer for the both of them to enjoy when this was done. Dell snorted. He’d give the people in Oxskull something to get in a tizzy about, if they already thought it was a technology-dark town. This was bringing in the goddamn witching hour. Dell, in his career, would take requests all the time from employers to invent something to do a specific job. But his best work would always be that which spontaneously sprung from his skull like a mechanical Athena. If he could bottle the feeling of floating along on endorphins, he surely would, and be rich and famous forever. It took the too-quick passing of another few days before the prototype was complete. It seemed as if every nerve was alight-oh, he was stepping into foreign territory, the sort of territory man was maybe not meant to step in. Dell wondered if those turn of the century folks felt like this. Danger being conducted through the sweat slick on their palms. Where no one had gone before, where no one would go for a long time again if something went wrong and everything was blown up in a terrific explosion.

     Dell took some deep breaths of night air poking its chilly fingers through the cracks between the barn slats and hefted an old wrench in his palm, tossing it a couple times like someone cautious about baseball. He leaned over to the workbench and pressed a button on a control console. There was some sparking from the disc in front of him, its double at the other end of the barn where he could still clearly see it looking rather like it was going to catch on fire. It was really glowing something fierce. No, that was fire, it was definitely on fire. Dell swore gleefully as he shot across the barn like a bat out of hell, fire extinguisher already at the ready. The metal glowed as hot as the sun before it was swallowed by the foam. The Texan performed to the sole audience of the moon until it retired for the night, stray bars of warbling country music drifting with smoke out of the chimney. 

    Somewhere in Oxskull, an expensive pair of binoculars were pressed to a windowpane, watching puffs finally rise from the barn in twos and threes as they once had so gloriously before.


	18. Chapter 18

    Constance’s finger kept snaking underneath her starched collar, tugging it away from her slick neck. The rapid jerking motion in which she yanked it throughout the day made it quite look like she was pumping a set of bellows, her shirt and sweater fluttering back and forth from her body. It wasn’t especially warm in the school; many of her classmates had their sweaters on in preparation for the chilly fall weather. Despite this logical fact, Constance sweat as if she was undergoing a surgical procedure without anesthesia. 

    She spent the whole day on the edge of her seat, her hackles raised, waiting for her scarred and disfigured mother to step out from behind a curtain and tell her it had all been a joke. Could it really be over that easily? Could everyone really be content with not saying anything about where she was from, what she had done? Constance felt like she was wearing her sins like a white-hot cattle brand upon her forehead. All of her teachers seemed to have this enduringly pleasant disposition, and Constance almost fell out of her seat with shock when one of them complimented and encouraged her doodling. She felt like an impostor. How could she hold the knowledge of what she had done heavy in her stomach, reinforced every time someone talked about it that it was Bad and she shouldn’t bring it up, that it was great she was in a new place where no one knew. It was almost suffocating. Constance wondered if she would feel better if everyone knew, because at least then the secret would be out. But that feeling vanished rapidly, leaving her hollow-feeling and clammy when a classmate in her math class asked if it was true that she came from New York. She knew, suddenly, with conviction- _ no one must know _ . Everyone was so normal here. She would stick out like a sore thumb. Constance suddenly felt a pang of longing for her old school, where it was normal for there to be at least a few kids outside the principal’s office at any given time. 

    The day seemed to zip by in the blink of an eye, and then it was lunchtime, and she was uncomfortably presented with the nicest cafeteria lunch she had ever seen in her life and released into the wild. It was too warm in the eating area, so Constance hurried outside, where there were a few girls milling around and laughing. The courtyards were mostly vacant, and she tripped over her new sneakers a new times passing stone pillar after stone pillar in search of something empty. Finally, she came upon it-a tree turning brilliant shades of orange and red resting upon a moss-covered hill. Satisfied, Constance set her backpack down next to some rocks and settled in for a private lunch. She had about five minutes of solace before she heard someone’s feet crunching on twigs, and that someone came bounding around the tree, one hand skimming the bark, sunshine in the golden highlights of her brown hair. 

    “Oh,” the girl said, surprise tinging her voice, “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to startle you. I’ve never seen anyone else come sit over here.”

    “I’m not moving,” Constance managed to say, her fingers tightening defensively on her fork. 

    The girl regarded her for a moment, tasting Constance’s rudeness, and Constance watched her swallow it. “Well, the more the merrier! My name’s Amelia.”

    Amelia had creamy, unblemished skin, and long hair that fell over her shoulders in waves. Her nose wrinkled when she laughed and she offered segments of her orange to Constance while she was talking. She loved to speak, to fill the air with her words, but they were all gentle and full of life and carefully chosen. Constance ate Amelia’s entire orange. She wondered if the other girl noticed.

    “You’re not from Washington, right?” Amelia asked, settling her legs out in front of her and stretching to grab her feet. She was in dance, she told Constance importantly but not snobbishly, and they had practice that evening. 

    “New York.” Constance said.

    “Oh, wow! That’s great. What brought you here?”

    Constance put down the orange peel she had been about to place on her tongue and a white-hot whip was cracked against the inside of her skull. Amelia, tactful and kind, opened her mouth.

    “I’m not from here either. My dad had the opportunity to move here for his job, but also, we came here because my sister needed a new school. She’s really smart! She just has some trouble with academics and making friends. I’m glad to meet someone else that isn’t from here! If you ever need help finding something, or want to study together or anything, just let me know! I like to eat lunch here every day. It’s so quiet and peaceful out here, you know?”

    Constance was very well planning on finding a new lunch spot when she noticed that Amelia’s gaze had fallen on her stomach. Sitting down against the tree had made her shirt ride up, and peeking over the waistband of her pants was a pinkish, twisted mark that was unmistakably a burn scar. Her heart rose in a peculiar way to her throat, and Constance watched Amelia as if the other girl was about to strike.

    Amelia lifted her eyes to Constance’s, smiled, and talked about dance practice.

    James propped up his feet on the corner of his desk, and looked at her expectantly like he was waiting for her to do the counseling. Constance sat stonelike in her chair.

    “How’s the first day been?”

    “Fine.”

     “Make any friends? No pressure, of course.”

    Constance shrugged. She had clammed up every time someone had spoken to her, although an invisible hand wriggled from her stomach and through her throat, snatching her tongue. She wasn’t sure if she wanted to make friends. Of course she did. Constance thought about Seth, and a wave of nausea rolled into her mouth. But there was Amelia, who seemed insistent on talking to her for some reason that Constance couldn’t figure out, and Amelia’s smell that came when her hair bounced, which was somehow vanilla. 

    James told her that Lauretta had demanded Constance be allowed to use a school telephone to call her and report how things were going. He dutifully left the room as the phone rang and rang, and finally, a breathless voice on the other end.

    “Constance! I’m so happy you called. How are you?”

    She wasn’t quite sure how to answer.

    “How are you?”

    “Me? Oh, I’m fine, I’m fine. I’ve been asked to let you know that your father says you can call him anytime when he’s not at work.” A long sigh. “But I’m sure he’ll be just fine hearing about you through me. Everything is the same. Well, a little different. Some of the other housekeeping staff has been let go, now that you’re not here. But there’s a lot more nurses. I miss having you around to keep me company.”

    “I miss you too.”

 

    “Are you happy? Are they feeding you okay?”

    “Yes.”

    “You know, I was going to wait until it could be a surprise, but I can’t hold it in. I’m saving up money to come and see you. You’ll have to show me around!”

    Constance cradled the receiver close to her cheek.

    “I’ve got to go for now, but I’ll wait for your call next week, okay? Or anytime. I’ll do my best to answer. Bye, Constance.”

    “Bye.”

    She sat there for a while before she noticed that James was back in the room, one hand hovering over her shoulder. Constance had the sudden urge to whip her head to the right and sink her teeth into his arm. Had he been listening to their whole conversation? She reassured herself he must have knocked and she didn’t hear it. Fire began to spark on Constance’s tongue. She must leave.

    So she said, “I must go,” and she went.

  
  
  
  



	19. Chapter 19

    It was done.

    Dell removed the goggles from where they had sunk into pinkish imprints around his eyes, letting them rest on his forehead. His back was slick with sweat, his shirt clinging to him like a piece of plastic wrap. Dell desperately wanted to go inside and take a shower, but there was a magnetic force pulling his fingertips to the warm metal, compelling him to keep working, and Dell knew his insides would twist and contort painfully if he turned away from it. How long had it been? He glanced at the clock. Twelve. It had only been a few hours? He glanced out the ajar barn door. No. It was the middle of the night. It was clear into the next day. It didn’t matter. It didn’t matter how many days it had been, as long as it was finished. He hadn’t worked this manaically on something for a while, and the electricity conductive in the palms of his hands was draining, in a refreshing way. 

    It was time. He had stopped counting the times he’d rerun the calculations. Dell’s arm snaked out to his right, fingertips brushing against the cold and reassuring metal of the fire extinguisher he had at the ready. A breath rattled out of him like he was on his deathbed. Frustration might as well topple him off his seat if this didn’t work. Back creaking like a rocking chair, he leaned forward and flipped a switch.

    It took a minute to activate, the two extended metal arms taking their time to spin, trails of intense light carving the outline of an electric circle into the air. Blue sparks flooded the interior of the circle, the arms spinning faster and faster, Dell holding his breath, fearing that one exhale would cause the whole thing to burst into flame. He dared take a glance behind him, where the copy of the thing on his workbench was following behind its twin. It was technology that he’d dipped his toe into in one of his doctorate programs, but dismissed it at the time. Thank the Lord he’d saved the blueprints he’d sketched rough designs out on. Dell let them whirl for a minute, and then satisfied they would probably not explode, hefted a screwdriver in his hand. He hovered the piece of metal across the first rotating disk, sweat collecting and loosening his grip, and sooner than he intended to, it slipped from his fingers. Dell flinched automatically; the angle at which he had dropped it meant it would probably ricochet off the metal and fly at his face. No sting of his cheek ever came, and he peeked from behind his fingers at the sight of decidedly no screwdriver anywhere in front of him. Hardly daring to believe, Dell almost gave himself whiplash turning around.

    If an inanimate object could be gleeful, the screwdriver was exactly that, rolling slightly back and forth from the breeze of the spinning arms. It had  _ made it _ , Dell repeated to himself, rising off his stool with the force of his joy, and not blown up!

    Lord, he had tests to run. What was the maximum distance he could send something? What was the maximum weight? What about organic flesh, like an apple? What about something living? What about a person?

    Dell paused, hands close to his chest and tucked together like a worrying old woman. 

    Of course, it was always intended for a person. But he hadn’t quite gotten that far yet in his mental planning that someone would have to test it, to make sure it was safe for people. He was a person, the lone person on this project, and that meant that he would have to test it. In college, there were people that didn’t have a penny to their name willing to be tested on for a few hundred bucks and a signature on a liability waiver. But there wasn’t the luxury of that safety net now-even if he got his hands on the same waiver and wrangled some poor soul into testing it for him, if something happened he couldn’t explain, the state police probably wouldn’t look too kindly on it. He didn’t need to have any more eyes on him. If it wasn’t safe and it transported him to another dimension or through to the other side with a third arm bursting out of his chest, that might as well be it. But he’d start slow and small. Run calculations and predictions. He was itching with an excitement that made Dell feel like he was about to take flight. Whatever happened, whatever he must do to make it work, it would be worth it, in the end. He knew it.

    Lawrence’s feet were masked in puffs of dust, sweeping the porch in front of his store with methodical strokes. No matter how many times he swept a day, a breeze ran through Oxskull that always kicked sand and dirt up onto the floorboards. Dell admired a man with dedication to keeping things orderly, no matter how much the world seemed to be against him. He diligently kept his feet out of the way, resting his calves on the arms of one of the chairs Lawrence had taken to keeping out on the porch so they could sit and have a beer. 

     “Could you get critters shipped in? Traps?” He asked his friend absentmindedly, the ice in his glass of sweet tea clinking together. Of course, he would hold sadness in his soul until he passed for any little thing he hurt in the testing process, but he’d start with something smaller first. Like a cricket.

    “You taking up hunting out there?” Lawrence asked, raising one eyebrow. 

    “Nah. Gotta test something I’m working on.”

    “Depends on how big the critter. Traps, definitely. Already got some. They’re kind of dusty, though, mostly only popular with the folks passing through and people having problems with mice and the like.”

    “Mouse traps would be just fine for now.”

    “What is it you’re working on, if you don’t mind my curious old bones prying? You’ve never needed something living before, to my memory.”

     “I don’t really know what to call it yet,” Dell admitted sheepishly, letting the brim of his wide hat fall over his eyes. “It sort of...moves things. Transports things from one place to another.”

    “Like a teleporter? From them science fiction novels?” Lawrence shook his head and made a sputtering noise. “I swear, next you’re going to tell me you’ve built a spaceship.”

    “Easier to build than you’d think.” 

    “Well, look who’s saying it. Give me the instructions and I’d probably blow myself and half of Oxskull away.”

    The two of them were content to continue their joking into the late afternoon, sipping on tea, Dell’s eyes falling across the street. Lawrence’s porch was optimal for some good people watching; best place in town for it. He enjoyed seeing the hustle and bustle. This particular day his gaze fixed upon Marie, whom he had run into at Lawrence’s store a couple weeks prior. Today she looked rather gaunt, the skin on her cheeks grey and hanging off her cheekbones, her eyes dully glinting inside the cavernous shadows of her browbones. She looked like the reaper, making her way slowly across the street, handkerchief clutched in her brittle fingers for dear life.

    “What’s going on with Marie?” Dell asked, one hand raising his hat from his forehead. “She looks like someone went on and died.”

    Lawrence only shrugged, beating the doormat with his broom.

  
  
  



	20. Chapter 20

Constance had been told once by her mother that she was gullible. Constance did not particularly agree. She thought she was simply rather adept at judging situations in which she was likely to be starved to death or slapped across the face if she did not comply. It was one of those situations that had seemed to descend upon her. It was due to that reason that she found herself in one of the principal’s secretary’s office, wrists deep in dusty, meticulous files. 

“You little thief,” her mother had once hissed, lilac nails digging into Constance’s arm, when she caught her daughter stealing cash from her wallet. “Do you have anything to say for yourself?” She said that she was only hungry and using it to buy something to eat at school, as Constance’s mother had put them all on a diet so restrictive it was making her dizzy walking to class. Her mother told her to get used to it and released her grip, but a little too quickly, so there were shallow cuts on Constance’s arm for a week or two afterwards. Constance learned to be a better thief. It was a good thing she was a good thief, but she had not stolen anything in a long time, feeling tensions rise in the Harlow house like a catastrophic tidal wave. It should be simple enough. She had good ears from years of keeping them pricked, trying to detect where her mother was in the house. So maybe she was gullible, doing this for them. Constance viewed it as the best way to survive; the same way she made most of her decisions. Constance did not wonder what she had done to evoke Ophelia’s wrath. She was the new girl, that was surely enough. There was no malice in her request, no resentment in the way she swept into the courtyard where Constance was eating lunch(Amelia wasn’t feeling well that day, and hadn’t gone to classes. Constance was too shy to ask if she should come eat lunch in her room) and her two cronies fanned out from behind her like a set of wings. But she could feel the wrath, all the same, in the assertive, confident way she made her statement. You will do this for me, or else. How could she not feel it, when she had spent her whole life doing it, or else? Constance was not dumb. She did not go to a teacher, or her counselor, like the cheerful woman that made the anti-bullying presentation at her old school told them to. Everyone knew what happened to snitches, and it was best to be useful, for a little while. Until they got tired of her and moved on to the next fresh bait. 

But it was different, this time. Ophelia, as she introduced herself kindly, had something for Constance. She had forgotten where she’d placed it, but would surely remember, if Constance went and got something she was having trouble getting. The secretaries apparently knew Ophelia and her cronies well, and if she even stepped within a small radius of the administrative building, would not be left alone. It was easy enough to be unnoticed, to sneak in, to get the file and go. Constance did not ask what Ophelia wanted with a student’s file. There were too many reasons she could think of. Her fingers skimmed past file after file. Out of curiosity, Constance went back to the H tab. A low feeling of discomfort unsettled her stomach when after several attempts, she could still not find her own file. All right. So they had her file, too. Constance had never read her own file, and she was not sure how much detail was in it. It surely must say where she had transferred from, and even if that was all, they might be able to call up and see why. 

Constance realized she had frozen in place, and the little spinning statuette on the secretary’s desk had ceased rotating. She needed to get moving. She almost crashed into Ophelia when she made her way around the corner back into the courtyard, file stuffed under the back of her shirt.

“Well?” Ophelia asked kindly, like she was wondering about the outcome of an exam. Her eyes, widely spaced above a smattering of freckles, were fixed on Constance like a cat waiting to strike. She had brown hair, and so did her cronies, which were honestly rather indistinguishable from one another except one was a little taller. Ophelia, of course, was the tallest. “Connie?”

She turned it over.

“Oh, excellent!” Ophelia said, eyes sparkling. She reached behind her, file outstreched, and the shorter cronie took it promptly. “Well done. I’ll have to call on you in the future, that was so fast! Jolene?”

Her prize, then, was an envelope. It was heavy when Constance took it, but still sealed. They all watched her with a sort of snakelike expectancy that she understood well enough, and ripped it open, scanning the smudged paper hurriedly as if it was about to be taken away from her. She was a litte surprised when it wasn’t, and Ophelia stalked away like a tiger in tall grass, smiling to nothing in particular.

 

“So, Constance,” James went, leaning so far back in his chair he threatened the laws of gravity. “Tell me about your week.”

There was always an amount of carefulness that he had, Constance noticed, but it was well-hidden behind a facade of being nonchalant. It always made her wonder how much he really knew, and it he was writing down what she didn’t tell him about. 

“Seth wrote to me,” she finally said after a pregnant pause. “My-”

“High school friend, yes, of course. You ended on bad terms, right?”

Constance didn’t care lately for confirming statements. She shifted her eyes to the ceiling, where there was a pattern in the raised bumps that looked like a lion.

“What did he say?”

She shrugged. Nothing important.

“Are you ready to forgive? I don’t think you’ve ever told me why you hate him so much, Constance. He was your best friend, and then you just cut the line. Tell me more about that.”

“Make the connection.” Constance answered, not unkindly. “It would be like you thinking that I care about you, and then I told your boss that you smuggle a flask in your briefcase, because I care about you.”

They stared at each other, then James laughed, and took his heels down from his desk. He wagged his finger at her, and she could not calculate whether his forehead was shiny from unease or something else. “You think he was the one that called your mother, when you ran away?”

“I know it.”

“But you just said it yourself. You know he cares about you. He was obviously concerned that you wouldn’t do well on your own, and cared enough to let her know where you probably were.”

“If he really cared, he would have known that whatever could have happened to me when I was on my own wouldn’t be worse than anything she could do.”

“There could be many reasons why he told her.” James said offhandedly. “Do you really want to hate him for caring about you? Let me tell you, finding someone that gives that much of a shit about you can be really difficult in this world.”

“I will never forgive him.” Constance said calmly, swinging her legs in the stiff-backed chair. She had pondered why she was naturally inclined to choose the slightly uncomfortable seat in front of James’ desk and not the plush armchair, but she had made an abrupt decision in her first appointment, and it felt weird to change it. James would probably say that it meant something about her psyche, and then she could crack another joke about how his desire to carry that flask around like it was an insulin pen meant something about his. She had power, now, and it felt cruelly delicious to flex it. 

“Constance?”

“I will never forgive him,” she repeated, shaking herself out of her train of thought. “He did something my mother would have done, and threw me back into her fire.”

Later, when their appointment was over, Constance nearly sprinted back to her room, arms stiffly held at her sides. Finally alone, she released a shuddering breath, her face slick with sweat. She unfurled her fist, a battered silver lighter falling out onto the carpet.


	21. Chapter 21

How long had it been? It didn’t matter. That seemed to be an internal reassurance he was giving himself rather often lately. 

Telemax was the name scrawled across the top of the blueprints. Dell knew he was sitting on something special. Something really valuable. This could reignite his career if he played his cards carefully. But first, of course, he had to be sure it worked. It was a task that he had been putting off for a little while. While he was avoiding it, leaning against the countertop and waiting for his pecan pie to finish in the oven, he wrote his will with a steady hand. He wasn’t suicidal. Not even close to it, Dell told himself. But he was driven by invention and he would be damned if he would spend the rest of his life wondering if it really worked on people. He’d done enough calculations. He didn’t want to think about how many times he’d run them or how many tests he’d done. Dell had worked his way up from the wrench to an apple, to pretty much everything that was heavy and would fit through it. He couldn’t bring himself to test the barn cat that had now taken to hanging around and mewling at him from the rafters. The cat gazing down at him while he worked made him think about having someone there. Other than the cat. If something caught on fire, it would be all hell if it spread to Oxskull. Someone had to put a dish of milk out, to carry out his affairs. 

 

“So, you’re really going to do this?” Lawrence asked, removing his hat and holding it with both hands like a worrying grandmother. 

“I have to,” Dell answered, running a hand over the top of his freshly shaven head. “Wouldn’t sit right to send someone else through it, if things go wrong.”

“Not to doubt you, but I really...I really am concerned about this.”

Dell opened his mouth to say that everything would be fine, and then promptly closed it. “I’m real thankful for you being here. I’m confident, Lawrence. Is that enough?”

There was a long moment of silence. Dell looked at his friend’s face, heavy with wrinkles and weighted eyebrows that cast long shadows.

“I do believe in you, you know.” he said gruffly. “I brought something to celebrate if it works. Let me put it in the fridge.”

When Lawrence came back, the teleporters were on and whirring. The older man was speechless for a minute, watching the glowing circles, and was glad he wasn’t carrying the beer. Dell had put out a lawn chair for him, and he took the seat rather shakily.

“Ready?” Dell asked.

Lawrence nodded. He could not bring himself to speak.

Dell swung his arms a few times back and forth, as if he was about to dive from a great height. 

“I guess I’ll go, then.”

It took him a few more seconds before he had the nerve to approach the teleporter. Do it, Dell, he told himself firmly, and made himself step onto it. He was looking at Lawrence, and then Lawrence was not there. A crippling fear overtook him before he swung his head wide and located his friend staring at him with a slack jaw from the other end of the barn.

“I’ll be damned,” Dell said with a touch of wonderment, and stepped off. “It worked. Got all my limbs, yeah?”

He was brushing himself off when Lawrence stood up, bracing himself on the back of the chair for support.

“I can’t believe it. I can’t believe what you’ve done! This is incredible! We’ve got to celebrate!”

Before he could say another word, Lawrence was skidding to the entrance of the barn, kicking up a wicked cloud of dust behind him. It was almost comical. Dell laughed, out loud, his hands on his knees. He’d actually done it. He had his spark back. He was rather tempted to go through a couple more times, to take better note of how he felt. He’d been so focused on if he was actually dead, he hadn’t noted anything else. 

“Here you go, friend.” Lawrence said kindly, coming around the door of the barn, waiting to tap the lip of his bottle against Dell’s. “You deserve this more than anyone I’ve ever seen.”

“Thank you kindly.” Dell answered warmly. “For all your encouragement, for everything. I really feel like I got out of that slump, and your friendship has helped a lot with that.”

“Bottoms up,” Lawrence said.

 

Dell awoke with his cheek in the dirt. He was drooling, too, making a little pond with his spit in the sand. Lord, how drunk had he gotten? He only remembered having the one beer. Dell raised his head and winced. It was pounding something fierce. He was no lightweight. What the hell had happened? His gaze fell through the open barn door. It was nighttime.

Something curdled in his stomach. 

He would look back on the feeling as a firm confirmation that he did have a bullshit detector, that he knew when he’d been wronged, and that he never should have doubted his own mind in the first place. Something wasn’t right, and he made himself get up and get the new shotgun that was strapped under the worktable. Lord, his head hurt. He staggered outside like a drunkard.

“What are you doing?”

Two upturned faces met his, painted with fear and the characteristic look of being caught red-handed. Dell squinted at them. They looked familiar. It didn’t matter who the hell they were, what mattered is their hands were on his teleporter, trying to get the folding mechanism activated. It was the sort of sight that made him truly consider he was seeing things. It was the sort of sight that activated a primal triumph of a man doubted-he had proof, now, that he was being messed with. Harassed. Made to think he wasn’t thinking straight.

“Now boys, I don’t know if someone put you up to this or this was your own idea, but I promise this ain’t gonna end well.” Dell told them softly, pointedly lowering his gun. “I ain’t gonna shoot you. You won’t be in much trouble. We can talk this out. Is it money? Do you need money? You ain’t gotta steal.”

The younger one was shaking. He kept flicking his gaze like a fly fishing pole between his older brother and Dell’s gun.

“Hey, hey. Look at me, son. You can tell me.” Dell told him quietly. “Please just return what ain’t yours.”

Fuck. Damn it to hell. The older one had been fiddling with it behind his brother’s back, and all of them jumped when it suddenly whirred to life, its arms raising to the night sky and folding in upon themselves into a neat little toolbox. 

“Let’s go,” the older one said hurriedly, and wrapped his blasted fingers around the handle.

They took off faster than Dell thought kids could go. He knew there was a half a chance he would kill himself, even with his finger off the trigger, running around in the dark like this. But he had no choice, despite his pounding skull. He had to get back if it killed him. He couldn’t take it.

“Hey!” he shouted. Dell could barely make them out in the darkness. “HEY!”

If there was something he could have done to stop them, Lord, he would have. He didn’t even know where he was on the property in this blasted dark. They must have cut the lights. If only he knew, he would give anything to stop the film seared on the back of retinas to not happen in one of the thousand times he replayed it in his mind. He would remember forever the sound of the younger boy’s shoe colliding with a rock, and then him tumbling, and rolling, and his eyes must have been going wide with realization. Or maybe he didn’t know that he was about to collide with a live electric fence.

Dell could not bring himself to tear his eyes away. The boy did not scream. But there was sound, and smell, and sight, and he found himself on his knees, the discarded gun next to his thigh.

The older brother’s eyes were wide with horror. He turned his head to look at Dell.

“I didn’t mean-”

The boy was clutching the toolbox for comfort, and then he was gone.


	22. Chapter 23

    Dell sat on a hay bale and felt more exhausted than he had in his entire life. It felt as if all the strength he had left was gone from his body, leaking through some invisible wound, and he wondered if this is what it felt like to die. Would he die, just give out after the indescribable horror of what he had witnessed? The human body was far too resilient sometimes, in his opinion. Sometimes it wasn’t worth living through things.

    Lord, he was tired. He wanted to sleep. But Dell couldn’t make himself get up and ask one of the policemen if he was free to go. He didn’t want to know if he was being detained. It was better to sit where he wanted of his own free will, breathing in the night air that scratched the back of his throat with its cold, and pretend he was somewhere else. They hadn’t called Marie yet, he knew. Anyone in town could have identified the boy. Dell had watched the policemen trudge across the field to the fence that he had hurriedly shut off, although it wouldn’t make a difference. It was the second time they were calling the coroner in a while, Dell overheard one of them say. Busy for Oxskull. He had explained until his mouth was dry, and explained some more. Dell had thought of calling Lawrence and his father, but declined to do both. His head was still a little foggy, but he was a smart man. He may have been a dedicated student in school, not much of a partier, but he was a smart man. Dell knew he’d been drugged. Had the boys been running to Lawrence with his creation? He wouldn’t be surprised. Dell almost thought Lawrence would have just outright taken it himself, with all the opportunity he had. He had gotten kids involved, and one of them was dead. Dell’s fingernails dug into his palm so hard they drew blood, but he didn’t feel the stinging.

    The sheriff sidled over to him, his hat low over his eyes. 

    “Mind if I sit, Dell?”

    “Please do.”

    There was a long silence where the sheriff looked at the spinning lights of the few patrol cars in town, parked askew over the front yard.

    “Terrible, terrible tragedy, Dell. I can’t imagine how you must feel, this happening on your property.”

    “I can’t describe it,” Dell tried to say, his voice cracking. “Those boys...have you found…”

    “The older one? No, we haven’t found him.”

    “Hope he’s safe.”

    “You said they took something of yours, didn’t you?”

    “Yes, in my statement, and to a few of the folks. They-”

    “Real dark outside.”

    Dell looked at him. “I saw what they took right out here. Porchlight bright enough to see. Only dark out on the field.”

    The sheriff nodded. He would not look at Dell. “And you chased them, right?”

    “Well, I-”

    A hand was lifted. “Let me give you some friendly advice, Dell, off the record. Way I see it, you were the only one out here for miles. You could’ve been firing bullets at their heels. Scaring them shitless right into that fence. But no one saw it. You could call a fancy lawyer and bring him down to Oxskull, and we could all take this up to the capital to a real fancy courthouse. But we like quiet here in Oxskull. It was a real terrible tragedy, Dell. Sorrow could drive a man to take a long, long drive away from here.”

    The sheriff stood and tipped his hat. “Ah, looks like our friends from the county are here. They want your statement as well, then.”

    Dell stared at the ground and listened to gravel pinging off the underside of a vehicle. The smell of cigarette smoke announced the county policeman’s presence before he was in front of Dell, tapping ashes onto the dirt.

    “May we take this into a more private space?”

    “Will the barn do?”

    “Just fine.”

    He felt the man’s eyes on him as he slid the door shut and took a seat on his stool. The cold metal of his workbench dug into Dell’s back, but he didn’t much mind it. They sent a Frenchman. That was extravagant for the Texas county. 

    “I’d like to offer you a job.”

    Dell finally raised his head. A pair of cool blue eyes looked at him from above a scarf that covered most of his face, under a mop of tousled salt and pepper hair. He was in all black, adjusting the fit of leather gloves on thin, long fingers, and Dell blanched.

    “You’re not from the county.”

    “No. Private employer who much admires your work.”

    “Not much left of the hard copy.”

    “No matter. They’re willing to give you the time and resources to recreate it. With handsome pay, and a way out of here. I sense that there is a general opinion you should leave this town.”

    “Yes, that’s the opinion.” Dell sighed, long and slow. He almost couldn’t believe he was considering it, but the sheriff was right. It would be best for him to leave. No one would trust him. He had enough funds to relocate, set up shop somewhere else, leave this behind him. It was damn convenient, and he would be a fool to ignore it.

    “You have a contract with you?”

    “Of course. One moment.” A copy was produced, and Dell fumbled for the switch on his workbench lamp. The man was patient as he read, scuffing his foot around in the hay. Dell cast a few glances at him.

    “This is...handsome is an understatement. What kind of company do you work for?”

    “Munitions.” The man shrugged. “Gravel.”

    “Munitions and gravel, huh? Never would have thought there was much money in gravel.”

    “Are we in agreement?”

    Dell looked at the rafters. Perhaps the barn cat was up there, staring down at him with those orblike eyes, either hoping he would say the affirming words or come to his senses. Would it really be that bad? There wasn’t a whole lot on the paper, but a promise of a whole lot of money, unlimited resources, and a train ticket out of here immediately. What more did he want, really? It was enough that he was willing to take that train and learn more.

    “Yeah. Yeah, sure.”

    “Excellent. Are you ready to leave?”

    “Well...I have to pack some things. I can be ready within the hour, if you need. And there’s someone I’d like to say goodbye to.”

    “Not necessary,” the man said, attention on the phone he was dialing.

    “I’m sorry?” Dell asked, with a little chuckle. “You can wait for me to pack, but not to make a short drive? What about just a call? Is it a security measure?”

    “Not a security measure. I mean, it is quite unnecessary. I am right here. One moment.”

    Dell watched him in disbelief as he stalked to the middle of the barn, speaking in a low voice on the phone, and then promptly collapsed the antennae and stowed it back in his suit pocket.

    “Where were we? Oh, yes, your goodbye.”

    He pulled out a shiny silver cigarette case and walked behind a post, and then Dell heard it snap shut.

   “What-”

    There was a burst of smoke, like a drawn-out magical trick, and then Lawrence was coming out from behind the post with the same blue eyes and bored expression. Lawrence waved at him, his mouth set. 

    “Bye, Dell.” he said, in a perfect Texas accent.

    “What...in the Lord’s name...Lawrence? How?”

    “Do catch up, laborer. I am Lawrence. He is me.”

    “What?” Dell shouted, loudly.

    “Please lower your voice.”

    “Lower my...are you serious? Are you damn serious? What the hell? How long were you pretending to be him? You lied to me! You  _ drugged  _ me!”

    “All in the course of business.”

    “You  _ killed _ that kid! That little boy! That was you, wasn’t it? You made them steal my work-”

    “I never wanted that to happen,” the man shouted back at him, and then cleared his throat and lowered his voice. “It was never planned. It was a horrible accident.”

    “That older boy. Where is he?”

    “He died a while ago. Overdosed on an illicit substance. The mother only knew that he was taken to the hospital, but not that he passed there.”

   “Then let me guess. That was you too, impersonating him. So they’re both dead.”

    “Regretfully.”

    “Regretfully. You are a son of a bitch, aren’t you?”

    Dell managed to get one swing in at the swathed jaw before his own cheek was being pressed into the dirt, the surprisingly heavy weight of the man’s knee in his back.

    “Please refrain from making a fool of yourself. I understand you are upset. But it is over.”

    “I thought you were my friend! You’ve been watching me this whole goddamn time! Spying on me! You…that was you, wasn’t it. You did something to mess with me, make me think I was crazy..”

   “This is probably not a good time to mention that I can become invisible.”

   “Lord. Can you get off me?”

    His request was obliged. “You have a brilliant mind. Which is why my employer wants to recruit you.”

    Dell regarded him for a moment, his jaw set. “You’re a snake, ain’t you?”

    “I have been called worse. You should pack.”

  
  



	23. Chapter 22

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hey guys! so I was actually really unhappy with the original chapter 22 and decided to rewrite it. so things are a little out of order with there being two dell chapters in a row(21,23) and now two constance chapters(22,24) but after that things will return to normal. 
> 
> i hope you enjoy the rewritten version with some Justice(tm)

    Maybe she had been too gullible. Maybe she should have stood her ground and said no, that she would not do anything for them, and let her dirty laundry just be aired. Constance was sure it would have gotten out anyway, but maybe having it done quickly, like ripping off a bandage, would have been better than this. The slow accumulation of heads turning in her direction, the near-murderer, the mutilator, there Constance went down the hall. One day she thought she was on good terms with a teacher and then they were giving her the same shifty eyes as everyone else. What was the point of trying the same on her schoolwork, if she would not receive the same caring and kind feedback just because of what had happened in self-defense? It was small at first, with a few whispers, and then it seemed like the whole school knew and she was utterly alone.

She had lost track of how long she had been at Northbrook. How many favors had she done for Ophelia, too dumb to understand why the older girl was running her into the ground? It had gone too far to just be her and her cronies picking on the new kid. Constance was sure of that. It had probably taken her too long to realize that there was a personal element to the bullying, the rumor-spreading. The similarities in the faces of Amelia and Ophelia had been there all along, and perhaps she was dumb to have taken so much time to see Ophelia felt she had done something satanic to her sister. Maybe they would have left her alone and kept quiet about her file if she hadn’t kissed Amelia and just stayed friends. Maybe if they weren’t even friends. But that was the one good thing she had left, and Constance was sure that she would die giving it up. It baffled her sometimes how quickly things had turned under her nose, and how she had thought it would be different. 

    It would follow her around for the rest of her life, she knew it.

    Anywhere she went, any school. They would find out, and she would get the same treatment, and she would not be so lucky to find another like Amelia. She would not get a chance to explain herself, or have a teacher give her a golden star. Her face might as well be branded with her crimes, and she was doomed to be alone. The world was crashing down around her ears, and she clung to the faint memory of how things had been when she had arrived, when no one knew. She hadn’t appreciated it like she should have. She did not want to write back home or to Seth, she was repeating the same numb lies to Lauretta, and she could not talk to her counselor. Constance was confident he was reporting everything she was saying to her parents. 

He was on someone’s side that wasn’t hers.

    Amelia met her in the hallway outside the administration offices. Constance was still pressing a dripping bag of ice to her jaw, and welcomed Amelia’s cool palm on her other cheek. She did not care anymore that they were in plain sight. Let it come. Let it come.

    “What did they say?” Amelia asked, softly, fearfully.

    “I could get expelled. If I don’t get my grades up and don’t stop hurting myself for attention.”

    Amelia was quiet.

   “It’s fine. Maybe New York would be better than this.”

    “Constance…how can they do this?”

    She shrugged. Her jaw throbbed. There was a lump forming on it.

    “I’m a problem kid. I have one last chance to ‘turn things around’.”

    “Maybe...we could pretend to not be together anymore. Maybe the beatings would stop. We could just see each other in secret.”

    “We tried that already.”

    “We could try it again.”

    “No one would believe it.”

    “I don’t want you to leave,” Amelia wept, burying her face in her hands. “Not just...New York would be horrible for you.”

    Constance held her, but did not answer.

 

    She lay in bed that night with her hands folded on top of her quilt and stared at the ceiling. There was no one else to blame for the bruises and black eyes that appeared on her body. Constance was well aware of what was going on. She was already a problem child they could pin things on, but she had chosen to ask Amelia to be her girlfriend, and that was the last straw. A girl-kissing problem child was worse than a regular problem child, something that they could not just look over. They would force her out, back on a plane or train to her parents. Lucky for them, that was exactly where she wanted to go. Constance smiled in the dark.

    She threw off her quilt and got dressed. It was easy to retrieve the battered silver lighter from under her mattress, and more homework that she was storing there. It was an often-used stash. On the weekend outings she was allowed to go on, it was oddly therapeutic to run off and burn piles of the stuff. It was the only thing keeping her from snapping. The flames licking at her fingers was the kind of grounding warmth that she needed, and now, she would call upon it again. It was dark, of course, as she leapt down the hall in sock feet, almost gleeful. 

    Constance waited a minute for her breathing to slow before she gripped the knob that would let her into Ophelia’s room and pushed. She had never been so bold as to come here, to the den of the dragon, that was currently snoring, those hands that had rained down a hundred beatings resting peacefully on top of the blankets. Constance was fast, and quiet. She was in and out and then leaning with all her might against the door. It did not take long for her to hear Ophelia wake up, and cough, and for smoke to start to curl out from underneath the door. There was the first attempt at opening the door. Constance held fast. The second, more frantic, with some shouting. She did not actually intend to burn Ophelia alive, just to scare her a little. The door rattled in its frame with desperation. More smoke. More screaming. It was more of a tearful whining, actually, a pleading to an absent god above. She was terrified, all right. Constance saw a few lights flick on underneath the doors of Ophelia’s neighbors. It was time to get out of there. Her fingers were releasing on the doorknob when there was a peculiar silence. Constance hesitated a minute, wondering if she had misjudged the situation and Ophelia had actually passed out from smoke inhalation, and she opened the door.

    The window was open. She went to it. A few stories below, there was a body on the ground in its nightdress, twisted like a gnarled root. Constance’s breath stopped in her throat. Ophelia started to move, and to wail, and there was commotion in the hallway. 

    She turned her back to the scene, fingers gripping the windowsill, and lifted her chin.

  
  


 


End file.
